I Can't Love Her

I can’t love her. I cannot fall for her because once I start I will fall and fall until there is nothing left in my universe but the love I have for her. I cannot fall because she will never catch me. Because one way or another she will hurt me, she will always hurt me, she has been hurting me every single moment since the moment we first met. At first when she refused to talk to me, when she scorned me because everyone in our grade thought she was me on her first day of school, when she choose her other friends over me, when she was exiled along with me and we became best friends in that instance, when showed up at my dance studio dressed as a vampire and she was so beautiful she made my heart burst wide open, when we lost communications after I left our middle school, when our friendship was stitched back together in freshman year, when I accused her of leaving me a hateful anonymous voicemail, when I finally got up the courage to tell her that I like girls and she fully accepted me for it, every single time she brings up her crushes ‘sexy’ accent, every time she’s flung herself into my arms and screamed at the top of her lungs because some loser’s broken her heart, the rare occasions when she’s allowed herself to cry in front of someone, it’s always been me, every time she’s needed me and I was there to catch her, she has hurt me in every possible way because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she will never, ever catch me.

I know why they call it falling in love, because it’s a gamble, just like everything in life is a gamble. You just have to close your eyes and let yourself fall, and you have to pray to whatever god or deity you worship that there will be someone there to catch you. It’s like silk or water slipping through your fingers, one minute you’re there and the next you’re falling ceaselessly through nothing and everything and you pray, gods, you pray, beg, cry, scream for someone to love you enough to pluck you from that emptiness. Their arms wrap around you and you know, you just know, that you’ve stopped flailing and searching for something that will never be there, you’ve found what you were searching for, half of your soul is no longer missing, your heart in no longer broken. You will fight and cry and scream and hate each other time after time but you will never, never forget that feeling of chaos that encircles you as you fall endlessly through pandemonium, through a nothingness so insane that the only thing that can possibly keep you from losing your mind is the faint, indefinite promise that there may be someone out there who loves you just enough to catch you.

I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her. I can’t love her.
But I do.