Unrequited Love

By Nicole Cater

I have to drift away.  I need to do it for my own protection.  I can’t do this;  it hurts.  I have to sit here and take it and pretend that it doesn’t.  In fact, I do everything to prove it doesn’t; but it does.  It kills me…because I love him…and I shouldn’t.  He doesn’t even want me to.  Its constant rejection and I must just be some sort of masochist because I keep signing up for the pain and punishment.

And I’m so lonely.  So, so lonely.  We were a couple in everything but name.  But now it’s all fucked.  Why am I not enough?  I’m great enough to be best friends with, but that’s the very thing that’s keeping him away from me?  Aren’t you supposed to be best friends with the one you love?  I’m the one who’s done the work, put in the time, cared when no one else did.  All that gets me is “I love you” and “maybe someday”.  If something better hasn’t come along…

But why am I not the better one.  What is wrong with me?  I want to shout from mountain tops that I’m special, I’m beautiful, I have it all.  And yet no one wants it.  Least of all him.  I am space filler for something better to come along and I have to suck it up and pretend that it doesn’t bother me.  It bothers the fuck out of me.  When you have to watch someone you love not just walk away from you, but do it with another woman, and want you to actually still be involved, it’s like a knife in the heart every moment.

It’s not okay.  I can’t do it.  The pain is excruciating.  I’m not strong enough to bear it every day for god knows how long.  Does he even realize all the ways that he hurts me?  I want to fight for what I think is mine.  But that would just push him further away.  He wouldn’t even recognize it for what it is.  So I suffer death by a thousand cuts.  I hear him say things like “I hate that you love me” and “what we did was a mistake”.  What it really all boils down to is that he doesn’t want me, but he doesn’t want to tell me.  I hate his little cop outs like “I love you but I don’t want to screw it up” or “I don’t want to risk our friendship”.

I can’t do it anymore.  I won’t do it anymore.  Besides, he’ll be busy with his new girlfriend.  Who is not me; and never will be me.  I don’t fit in the Friend Zone.  I never have.  I’m not cut out for that role with him, so it won’t work.  The only I told you so here will be to himself when he realizes he fucked it up anyway.  I never should have wanted him back in the first place.  It was a foolish notion to think that he’d want me.

And right now it feels like a foolish notion to think that any man would want me.  Really, am I that bad?  I have problems, what person doesn’t?  What makes me unworthy of love?   I’m a good person.  I’m a woman that someone should want to love.  And yet, I see lesser women being loved every day while I sit, alone, subject to a life of solitude and I can’t even figure out why.  Do I come on too strong?  Are my standards too high and unrealistic?  I just want to be wanted.  I want to want someone too.  I want it to be him.  But it won’t be.  And he’s too stupid to realize that the sex wasn’t even part of the equation.  Whether we had done it or not, I would feel this way. 

But I will not let anyone know and I will slowly drift.  I will leave slowly like the tide, gone before one realizes it was happening.  I refuse to let anyone see me hurt about this.  It will be my own private journey.  And when I’m gone, when I’m lost to him for good, perhaps he’ll realize what was within his grasp.  And if so, I hope it haunts him for the rest of his life.  Because it will for mine.