The Other Side of Silence

"My version of falling in love is borderline psychotic. Should be avoided at all costs. Get obsessed. Can't fall in love and function at the same time. All-consuming. Tunnel vision. Euphoric."

And there's so much you feel and so much you want to say, but where do you begin?

It's all consuming. Tunnel vision. No hope. No help. No nothing. I'm drowning and flying, feet kicking, dirt in the air, trying to shovel through him, trying to move through me.

The difficulty is that he's with me all the time, even when I'm alone. The absence of him is heavier than the presence of most other people. It's never been like this before. It happened, ripping the skin off me, a splinter in my side, breath on my neck that wakes me in the night.

We're even together in my dreams.

And I can't write how I used to. My brain moves slowly, like a synchronised swimmer off-time. No, go left. No, dive deeper. Wait, what now? Turn, move, keep moving. Don't give in. Don't you dare give in.

But I already have. It makes me silent. There's something in this silence, the other side of it, something I don't like and want to go away.

"I like your vulnerability."

"I don't."

I know it's good to show it. I know it's good for him to see. Maybe that's what scares me, that he sees all of it, everything, all the things I don't like. He sees my make-up all over my face in the morning. He sees my hair, matted. He sees the jobs I don't get. He sees that auditions that go badly. He sees the book I'm struggling with, the stories I can't tell, the quiet I don't like.

Intimacy, by definition, is synonymous with familiarity. I don't want him to be familiar with things that I wish didn't exist.

"Do you ever think I'm ugly?"

"No."

"Never? Not even sometimes?"

"No. Never."

Maybe real beauty doesn't exist without real ugly.