Itch

I want so fucking badly to stop doing this.

And this one, this vice I love, that I keep sneaking off to take hits of, this itch I keep scratching until it bleeds, he might be the worst of it. Because he and I? We Should Be. We are made for each other. We should be together. We should be, with our dazzling chemistry and ridiculous compatibility, the couple that people look at and go, “That. I want that.” 

And none of it works.

I want to wake him up. I want to wake him up and tell him to move here. I want to tell him we should buy that house we looked at and we should get married and have babies and we should do this. We should. 

But we’d never ever make it.

Because we don’t work. 

He would do it, of course. He’d find a job and break his lease and move his life back here for me. For us. He’d uproot his life to build one with me. And if I’m being honest, I want that. I need that. Someone willing to be as committed, as all in, as I am.

But we’d implode. We’d devolve into carnage as we have so many times before, despite us making so much sense, despite us wanting the same things, despite us wanting this to work so badly. We wouldn’t. Because we don’t. And we refuse to learn this lesson.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Besides fucking up. 

I should stop calling him just because I know he’ll come. I should stop picking up when he calls, and we should stop strategizing career moves for each other and venting when we have bad days and we should stop sending random texts when we’re thinking of each other. I should end this, as gently as possible, before the next time we explode and do each other irreparable harm. I should let him go. 

I need to be strong enough to do this for him. For me. 

But I’m not tonight. Instead I throw my leg up on him and he instinctively palms my thigh and turns into me. 

“Love you,” he sighs into my hair as he often does when we’re sleeping.

“Love you, too.”

And I do. But it doesn’t matter.