Even though this post is named after a fave song of mine, it’s a little deeper than that.
I know you don’t mean to hurt me. I know it’s just your instinct taking over. But we aren’t supposed to be like this. I’m not supposed to feel like this.
You’re a really cool person. I’d want to be your friend. I’d want to work with you on a school project. Because you’re smart. Smart in the same way as me. Must be where I get it from. Every day I am reminded how much a part of me you are. Even in the little things. The smell of newspaper. Funky jumpsuits. Bookstores. Yet I still can’t manage to be mad at you. You make things better. Sometimes.
I get home at the end of the most dreary week and give you a hug. Little drops of sunshine tickle my nose, warming my cheeks. It’s a bronze color, tan as if you’ve spent hours in the sun, never really leaving the house. When you spend all day inside at work, a little liquid gold will fix you right up. It doesn’t hurt that the liquid gold smells like fresh baked sugar cookies, as if you warmed vanilla in the oven to make the house smell good. You read that in a magazine once. Last time you tried you almost burned down the kitchen. That’s something I would do.
I’m rinsed of the smells of the day, the overwhelming sweetness of girls’ perfume that stings the inside of my nose, harsh undertones of manufactured flowers clouding my senses. This is unlike anything else, subtle, a breath fresher than spring air, body spray, or car freshener. It reminds me that I’m not alone. But then you open your mouth. Little push pins hit me in the face, the kind that I’m not supposed to use in my walls, or else I’ll have to do the spackling. Your words reek like the food you think I’m hiding in my room, the secrets you want me to be keeping. You need a reason to be mad, and you somehow always find one.
You ask me why I never tell you anything, after hours spent talking in that bed, somehow more comfortable than anywhere else in the house. It was brown then blue then white, but always grey. The kind of grey I don’t know whether to embrace or fear. You’ve had the same sheets for over a decade. They smell the same as they did when I had a panic attack when I was nine and made you describe the 4th grade in detail. They’re tattered from years of dogs, kids, and wine. The kind of wine you drink in the middle of the afternoon out of a mason jar through a plastic straw you shouldn’t use more than once. They smell like betrayal and fear, the kind that hugs you and makes you feel safe, until they start passing judgement and picking at all your flaws. They make you feel heard, as the well-loved, silky soft curves hug your insecurities. That is, until you’ve finished your sentence and they constrict like a snake with its prey, squeezing the joy out of you, ready to devour.
There’s never anything in our fridge that you wanna eat. I think that’s why you got a new fridge last year. To make you want to eat. The oven has been broken for months. I think you won’t get a new one because you don’t like cooking for us anymore. It’s not my fault that Milo only eats things that are artificially orange. It’s not yours either. You would rather him be eating nothing but kale. Or at least that’s what it feels like when you say “Are you really going to put that crap in your body?” Or “Why won’t you ever work out? You need to move your body to feel good.” I’m not saying you’re wrong, because you’re not. But sometimes I just want to eat a fucking cheeto without you breathing down my neck about carbs and what that kind of dye will do to your intestines.
I love you, I really do. And I know you love me. But I’m not sure you like me so much. You want me to need you. You want to be my therapist, not what I want to talk about with my therapist. I just don’t understand why you won’t work with me. It absolutely baffles me that you can fill my bucket up with all the love I feel when we talk, and then tip the whole thing over, the raw, vulnerable contents of my heart spilled all over the hardwood floors you’d kill me if I spilled something on. And then you mop them back up, wringing them back out into the bucket, the once pure, happy thoughts a little cloudier with dust. Specks of dirt, debris, and loneliness clump around the rim. And it starts over. The bucket gets dirtier, and I always come back to you.