Nineteen again

It's two o'clock.  I got out of bed, half an hour ago, forced myself to put jeans on and now I'm under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the campus center.  Paper take-out box in hand, I'm sluggishly moving towards my mailbox, a secret part of me hoping that I'll find something there to relieve my latest slump; a letter, a message, anything.  I've been this way for a week.  Ever since I heard the latest rumors, ever since I realized the people who I thought were my closest confidants were anything but.

I'm a slut, they say.  I'll sleep with anything that moves.
It's fine.  I had never kissed a guy until last fall, but it's fine.
I don't know how to react when boys try to take my clothes off, but it's fine.
If you say I'm a slut, then for all intents and purposes, I am.
I don't care.  Much.

I see someone who I don't think despises me yet, at least not that I know of.  She's sweet, really.  We don't travel in the same circles but I can't take any more of what I've been enduring from my confidants this last week.  And she knows him.  That person that makes me forget what the others are saying about me.  When I'm with him, I feel as though I never left the island.  I feel silly, but not in the cheek-burning embarrassing way that I've felt in the recent days; simply naive and innocent and full of delicious unknowing excitement.  He's sweet to me.  I feel so beautiful when I'm around him.

She smiles and waves, and I pause, resting at one of the high tables outside the bookstore to chat.
"So, I have something to ask you."
My stomach drops.  Those four words, I've learned to dread them.  Used to be, my friends back home would ask me if I'd seen the new period drama on PBS, or if I was going to go out for the spring play.  Here, they were the harbinger of another malicious rumor.
"Are you sleeping with Tim?"
And there it is.  Looking at her face, I try to decide how to react, what to say- how to avoid more painful embarrassment.  I can't tell her how I feel.  Naive as I am, I can see that to answer in the affirmative is to confirm every rude suspicion about me.  I stumble, unsure.
"I mean, I'm seeing him, but we haven't...It's not a big deal.  We hang out sometimes, I guess.  It's not any serious thing."  I can tell that I've said all the wrong things instantly, but I don't know how to fix it.  I just want to drop my sandwich and shout to the whole world, I don't know how to date.  Boys don't like me, they just don't.  I'm the sidekick, the afterthought, the one who has to ask a sophomore to her prom because everyone else is taken.  Instead I say,
"Why?"
"Well, some of the rugby girls were talking about you.  They seriously hate you."
I mentally run through images of people in my head.  I've seen them pop up on facebook, but have I ever had a face to face meeting with one of them?  I don't think so...
"I wouldn't recommend coming around the rugby house anytime soon."
Like I would.  Like I know anyone to go to a party with, other than the people on my hall.  Even they don't invite me to things anymore.  In that second, I hate her.  I know she's trying to be kind, but I hate everything from her curly hair to her perfectly off-brand shoes.  But, I do my best.  I try to smile.  I try to blow the whole thing over.
"It's really not a thing."  I stayed up until midnight in his room last night.  I woke up when he had to go to class this morning. 
"We barely know each other." I fell so hard for him almost a year ago.  I didn't know it was possible to feel this way around another human being.
She looks at me, pitying.  I never learned to hide emotions, I never had to before.
"Well, you should know...he has a girlfriend."

Just like that and I can't feel my toes anymore.  My stomach has turned into a giant pit.  I have to stop myself from reaching up and brushing the spot on the my neck where he kissed me last night.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah.  She's abroad for the semester, but she'll be back in the spring."

I don't know what I say after that, all I know is that before I know it I'm back in my room and I'm broken.  So completely broken.  Somehow, after the beginning, I began to expect betrayal from everyone else in my life.  But not him.  Some distant part of me knows that I have hidden this possibility, this reality from the part of my brain that makes sense.  But now I can't ignore it anymore.  Before him, I had only ever been kissed once, in the hallway in my freshman dorm, by someone I didn't know how to say no to.  He is the first person that I have ever wanted to be with that seemed like they might value my company, my beauty, be willing to overlook my awkward lack of carnal knowledge. And just like everything else, this too is a lie.

A part of me died that day.  Since then, my trust has been giving sparingly.  Yes, we talked, and you claimed to have been honest about it the whole time.  But we both know, neither of us was totally honest; we both benefited from leaving some things unsaid.

I have written a million times over the first time I slept with you.  But here's the thing.  The hurt, the anger, it started not on that day in the spring, but on a november day months before.  You ask me why I haven't waited.  I'm scared, still.  I know what it feels like to be discarded, to be second best to you.  After that day, I took what I could get; it just so happens that the person who came next taught me the art of self loathing.

It's been eight long years, and I'm a very different woman now.  I'll never have that innocence back, and I'm not sure I would want it if I could.  I've grown, and I'm grateful for the lessons that I've learned.  I've moved on, you won't believe that from this account, but I really have.  I don't place people on pedestals the way I once did with you.

But then, we talk.  You make me laugh.  All of a sudden I feel breathless again.  And then I realize.

You're drunk.  You drink and you text me and then when you're sober you don't respond.

And somehow, I'm nineteen again, hoping against hope that you'll be drunk enough to want me upstairs, but not so drunk that you forget you invited me there in the morning.  Because when you're sober, you don't seem to want to talk to me.  But when you're drunk, you're angry that I've not waited.  I can't do this anymore.  Because in those moments, I'm staring into her eyes and she's telling me all over again,
"Well, you should know...he has a girlfriend."

And once again, for a millisecond, I'm broken.

In the last two weeks, I've had seven different people ask me out.  I've told them no.  I've made myself wait.  The one time I did go out, it was horrid.
I've said no to the Marquis de Lafayette, to other people that I work with, people I share my passion with.  I don't date where I work, I tell myself.  But then again, when a friend of a friend asks me, the answer stays the same.

Why?  Why after all this time and I still waiting for you, someone who has always seemed to have the luxury of time?

I want to say fuck it, I'm moving on.  But the last time I tried, I came right back to where I started three years later.

The whole point of this blog was that the people who mattered never had the chance to read it.  I'm not sure that that's still true, but I don't care anymore.  Maybe it's the wine, but I'm so jumbled right now that for the first time in ages I don't know where nineteen year old Emily stops and twenty-six year old Emily begins.

I care about you.  So much that it hurts.  If that's a thing that can't be reconciled, for God's sake let me go.  And even if not, there is no guarantee that this won't all still go up in flames. I'm not counting on anything.  But my mind hurts, and I need some answers.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do with this what I've done with countless entries before and turn it back into a draft.  It will go in my file of writing that's at times too painful for me to read.  You'll probably never see in, which all in all is a good thing.  Even if you did, it wouldn't change the state of things at all.

So here, and now I can say it.  My God, you make me feel alive.  You make my soul sing.  It's unlike anything else I've ever known, and it's addictive.  Please, be kind to me.  Please.