essays on love, part 4

It was somewhere between 7:00AM and 2:00PM and I was lying in the bed of a girl I had met the week before.

Simultaneously exhausted and unable to sleep right away, I kept adjusting myself on her mattress in an attempt to get comfortable. I am completely unsure of how much I slept in that span of time. I would feel like I had dozed off for only five minutes before waking back up and tossing and turning for another twenty. Somewhere in that fog of half-sleep I had an incredibly clear vision. It came with a focus and lucidity that punctured the hazy bliss of the past twelve hours. The vision was of my ex-girlfriend. The one I spent every hour of eight months trying to convince that we should get back together. The one every good friend of mine fought their impulses to tell me was no good and a waste of time. The one who couldn't understand why I liked her so much. The one that was a tumor on my brain, a static infatuation and a hopeless grasp for sanity.

The image I had of her was sly. She was standing in front of a dark grey, nondescript brick wall. Her posture conveyed an untrustworthiness that I could feel. What I remember above all else were the details of her face. She was ugly. Ugly in a way that I never noticed, but had to (just had to) have been there all along. Her smile was stained and black with a permanent chasm in her lip where a cigarette would usually sit. Her hair was frayed and pulled back, giving her face a taut, sinister look. Her height had always attracted me, the way it rose so close yet stayed under my gaze, but in that moment I saw her demeanor as cold and repelling. She looked a foreigner; a vagabond in the palace of a king; she knew she didn't belong. In that moment she freed herself from my heart, as she had been dreaming to do. This, now, was my dream.