#situationship core | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

almostsomewheremaybe · 17 days

Text

The Situationship

It was never supposed to be like this. How much misery has been left bleeding upon that executioner’s block? It’s still true, though. When I first looked into her soft and dark eyes— soft and dark like midnight wolves— I should’ve known it would end in hatred.

I had only gone over to my friend’s house that day to help them move. Every time a friend needs help moving, I’m one of the suckers who actually shows up. Carrying sofas, and Christian guilt in each of my arms. Praying that everyone keeps tally of all the good things I’ve ever done. I used to lie to myself about the kind of “good person” I was. Not anymore. Not after Rosalie and me’s situationship. I mean I was the kind of person who felt obligated to help our mutual friend move into his swanky new Hollywood studio, and she was the real no-bullshit type of New Yorker who made sure to show up only after the moving was done. She made every space she was in feel like a Bronx corner. She never cared if anyone thought she was a good person. I used to think that was a reason she wasn’t. One of her many character flaws I was sure proved she was the goddamn devil. But they weren’t sins. They were wings. Now, I sit in Hell envying her for the ways she could fly.

It’s been four years since our situationship ended. I ignored what happened for a while, but these days it’s a ritual to remember. A destination resort of honeymooning nostalgia and vacationing hypotheticals. All the forgotten gray empty spaces have become prime real estate for overthinking developers. It wasn’t that bad was it? I ask myself that constantly. I mean we had great sex. All the time. All over the place. Wherever we failed each other, we didn’t there. Our carnal chemistry just synced. I suppose that was one of the problems, though. We exhausted our intimacy in clawing sheets and biting skin and raising heart rates and there I go again. Maybe we let great sex take the fall for all the ways we lied to each other. Cause we lied to each other. Rosalie had wings but she was no angel. She liked to cuss and argue at high volumes. The cussing was poetry and the arguing was jazz. The shouting was her saxophone solo. I know this because my family goes way back in New York as well. The people from there are just not normal. They make audible conflict an artistic affair. On our first date she told me she had family in Queens. Always the dumbass I replied, Oh like Aunt May? She laughed at me in my fucking face. I felt moronic and appreciated at the same time. She smiled in city blocks, and her eyes gleamed when she saw I could take it. That was the spark in the beginning. It was probably the same spark that eventually burned it all down. On our second date, I surprised her by taking her to an escape room. She was four years older than me. Stunning. Talented. Cutting like the rim of a can you weren’t careful with. Accomplished. Her career was taking off. I was nobody with not a penny to my name, but I still paid for her. I wanted so badly for her to see me the way I saw her. We do that don’t we? Overestimate the importance of symmetrical perspectives. She loved the date, though. It had been a while since someone brought a little fun into her life. I had done whirlwind romances, tragic love stories, friends to lovers, and so had she. I wanted love to be easy this time. I thought this would be the perfect start to a perfect story. Predictably, expectations melted giving way to miserable reality. In every room we questioned each other more than we found answers to their riddles. She yelled, Why don’t you listen to me? I listened to you about the headless dolls in the nursery! Okay, so listen to me again. You fucking men. You do it right once, and then you think you can start fucking around. That’s your problem. We probably wasted twenty minutes like this. It was cute then. Courting like that. A baby hippo is cute until it grows up big enough to crush you with its bite. We finally got to the last room, and a worker came over the speaker to give us a ten second countdown before our time ran out. The pressure made diamonds, and we hit a buzzer beater to win. It was so close that the worker entered the room to tell us we lost, and we told them that, actually, we had won. That tension between winning and losing was something we never escaped. That night we opened our ribs, uncaged the butterflies in our stomachs, and left them behind. We didn’t go on too many “real” dates after that.

It’s interesting to me how a situationship is born. I had never been in one before Rosalie. She’d probably tell you most of her relationships were with men who treated them little different than what is considered a situationship. She’d probably be right, and I’d be indicted in that RICO case, but the fact remains— I had never done this before her. The only people I knew who had gone to Aspen to ski down the slippery situation-slopes, hadn’t done it like me and her. They were casually fucking, or friends with benefits who caught feelings. In the beginning we dated. Legitimately. The UN voted unanimously to approve us and everything. We dressed up for lunches. We talked trauma and fears under canopies of bed sheet. We exhaled childhood dreams across horizons of skin. All of that. But after two glorious weeks it was over. It became glaringly obvious we wouldn’t work. And then, by the sheer power of its own initial momentum, it kept going…

But we called it off? Not once or twice. Probably like six or seven times altogether. Exclusively. Mutually. Privately. Those slippery slopes gave way to an avalanche of ambiguity. Our situationship was like Michael Meyers. You couldn’t kill it no matter what you did.

If we had this supernatural spark between us, how come we didn’t prevail? For starters she was in Culver City and I was in the Valley. Her star was rising, and mine was plummeting to the ocean floor like the Titanic after medical icebergs began to rip me apart. (We’ll get into that later.) I moved into a shanty town studio just to be closer to her. Hoping it might help. We talked about our issues, and she made me listen. I sent her poems explaining how I felt. We tried. We really tried. And the contempt and distance between us grew up, married, and birthed a generation of resentment and distrust a thousand therapists couldn’t fix. But we stayed, together? The sex was still sexing. I still loved the smell of her hair in the morning. Taking walks with her dog and eating Ramen at our favorite spot on Melrose. She was still kind too. She would come over to my shit apartment, and sit with me in a sweltering unconditioned room, just so she could tell me things like,

You could be more confident. You shouldn’t count yourself out. And I would say, You shouldn’t either. You’re so smart. Creative. Hardworking. You give so much. Let me give you something. And I would try. I took her to see her first billboard on Sunset. She took me to get a new cellphone. We gave each other a lot of substitutions for trust, but your heart knows the difference between love and sweet gestures. Prior to being with me she had just left a seven year relationship. The fear of wasting her time was a bad omen marked upon my reason. A sleep paralysis demon that visited me every time I wanted to text her goodnight. Don’t send the wrong message. Don’t be too invasive. Don’t lead her on. The less she thinks of you, the less room there can be for disappointment. Now I told you early on that we lied to each other, and this was my untruth. I wasn’t hiding because I didn’t want to hurt her. I was hiding so someone else could do it first. Someone who could trump me as a greater evil, so I could obscure my own culpability and cowardice for not stepping up to the task of deserving her. I didn’t know it then, but the shame of it came later, and visits me often as I try to sleep alone in my dark room. She lied too, you know. I told you, yes, she had wings, but she was no angel. She was tough. Really tough. And really scared too. In the beginning when things started to unravel, she went and got with someone else out of spite. I didn’t hold it against her. We weren’t together. It was just a… situationship? Was there where it began? Either way it hurt. It hurt because I knew she wanted it to. Would she do it again? I was never the same after. She would repeat ad nauseam that she wasn’t looking for anything serious or long term. But she never meant it. She knew this untruth hurt so she stabbed me with it. Over and over. She’d made me feel so disposable. She’d toss me to the side, and text me six hours later to keep things going. She was so scared that I was another in a long line of many who had come to manipulate her, that she decided to be ahead of the curve this time. She’d use the oppressor's tools against him. It was fair. Rational. But it just wasn’t true. We never said I love you. We never really had a relationship. Like she said,

I told you I don’t want anything serious. But she was lying. She loved me, and I loved her too. That’s why it kept going. Even through the quarantine. We could lie and say it was hard to end because it was so intoxicating, but it was hard to say goodbye because we had a million unsaid I love you’s stuck in our throats— choking us. I love you was when we laid together in the shower listening to High School Musical, which I loved, or when she was sick and I’d rush over with chicken soup from the Mexican spot, she loved, or that Valentines day.

We approached Valentines Day not as friends, or romantic partners, but as two people trapped somewhere between maybes and almosts. I had found this restaurant that cooked her favorite cuisine, but the closest one was in San Diego. Valentine’s Day arrived, and I don’t know... She was so sweet. So deserving. Even as her situationship, I couldn’t let her go uncherished on this special day. So we drove down that evening. On the car ride we played In the Heights, taking turns as different characters, and singing our hearts out. We had never been so kind to each other. No one was trying or not trying. We just shared the space like so many colorful flowers in a garden. Everyone could be beautiful and loved. The food was bomb, and the night was fun. But it was the car ride to San Diego where we were soft and everyday-kind and fell in love.

We endured the quarantine as best we could. Towards the end of our thing I stopped the sex. I had this pipe dream that we could become just friends. One of my latest and greatest stupid ideas. I didn’t want us to lose each other. She knew it was already happening. When the riots in LA over George Floyd began I was out every night and day in the thick of it. She was worried about me, about my health and safety. My ankle had been bad for a while, and I should’ve seen a doctor, but the cause had called me into the streets. She looked sad every time I told her what was happening outside. The last day we spoke we were on FaceTime. I had to cut the conversation short, so I could get back out to the protests. Before I hung up I saw her face change. She had this strange somberness draped over her like a wedding veil. I told her I was sorry that I had to go. I had told her a billion sorry’s by that point, and had brought too few into union with changed behavior. She texted me after I got off the phone. She said,

Ur a bit of jerk I think

I immediately called her and got no answer. Something felt different. I texted her back, how

And that was it.

We never spoke again. I could tell she had broken free from this situationship prison. She was probably halfway to Cuba by now. It would’ve been wrong to fight for her back into this bullshit. It would’ve been wrong to tell her how much I missed her. Prayed for her. Thought about her every time I heard the music of two people arguing. I knew for her, freedom would require months of healing. If I really loved her, if we really ever had any love, now was the time to prove it. By letting it go. Shortly after, the doctor’s finally found my tumor. Originally I had a false positive for Leishmaniasis. I had passed out once coming out of the shower, and she had caught me before I hit the floor. No one had ever caught me before. Who was going to save me now? Chondroblastoma with secondary aneurysmal bone cysts in my left talas bone. That was the diagnosis. I never recovered. Not after three surgeries. I can barely walk today. Sometimes, I’m grateful she left when she did. This would have hurt her too much. Once in a while I check her instagram, and she seems really happy. I hope it’s true. I hope she stopped lying after our situationship. I know I did. We all have so much pain, and its truth will be heard, or its lies will be a reckoning.

So what’s so different about that situationship you can’t seem to forget? Like mine with Rosalie.

Was it the fact that when something is almost something, you can imagine it as you whatever you want it to be? Did it give us the space to see ourselves as full of possibilities? Digging deeper than conventions and traditions. I hope that’s how we saw it. When a situationship “ends” it’s not marked by anything except the paradox that maybe it never really even started. That somehow its shadowy form meant it wasn’t real, and didn’t matter. It doesn’t feel like that, though. We both left each other so often, I lost track of who really killed this thing, or why it hurt so much. Why did it hurt so much? When she first found out I was only twenty six, she told me,

I wish you were older. You have so much exploring to do. I’m now the age she was when we dated, and I have explored hospitals, and medical debt, and poverty, and disability, and I’ve never been able to give anyone what I gave to her. I don’t think I want to. I don’t think I ever will. But I want this situationship to be real, so the way she changed me can be too. I don’t lie so much now, not so that I can be a “good” person, but so that no one else gets hurt. Myself included. I want this experience to stick like a fridge magnet I’m not ashamed of, not hardened gum hidden beneath a school desk.

The situationship, for us, was those first few glances we shared in our friend’s new apartment the day we met. They were unspoken. They lingered just a little too long. Those glances could’ve been just that, except they demanded for more, and though their revolution failed, I venerate our situationship as a most noble attempt to honor love in a vast and terrible world. I still see her wolf eyes in the dark of my room. Still hear what we lost, howling in the night-wind.

She once said, In New York, to say you hate someone, means you actually love them. But only in New York.

So today, like any good paisan, I find myself smack dab on Arthur Avenue, just so I can say that I hate what the situationship did to us. I hate the roles we played in it. I hate what we did to each other as crabs escaping a barrel. I hate that we built that beautiful barrel. I hate how those memories descend upon me like harpies visiting Prometheus. I hate how I look up at an empty sky, and still anticipate you flying into view. I hate that you’ve flown so high, you can’t see me, down here, so low. I hate that we met. I hate that I’m not sorry we met. I hate our situationship. I hate all of it. I hate you.

#poetry #poem #poets on tumblr #spilled thoughts #spilled poetry #love #writing #spilled words #spilled ink #poet #poets and writers #poets corner #love core #situationship #short story #prose #original story #original short story

5 notes · View notes