The Best of Us

thirty four

referenced literature: Lullaby (Auden), sonnets 109 and 115

DECEMBER 2014

LOVING HARD, I CAME to realise, was the only way I knew how to love. My love trembled deep within me, always demanding to be felt, and when I denied it, it became ugly. It swelled in my chest until I couldn't breathe, pressed against my ribs with the threat of snapping them, and rang in my stomach like the shock after a punch. When I denied myself the love that burned inside me, that love denied me everything else; sleep, energy, appetite, companionship, juvenility, repose.

For a week after my fight with Bradley, I tortured myself. I clutched the knife in my gut and twisted it over and over, pressing it deeper inside me until blood spurted and spilled out around it.

Thomas, Jem and Clarke had all been right about me and guilt. Not just guilt, but shame and resentment and dread. There were times when I didn't know what to do without them so when they tried to leave me, I seized and clutched them, and begged them to stay.

It was what I felt I deserved, I supposed— all that suffering. There was something safe about it; something that felt as though it belonged to me and I, to it. It was part of my blood, my bones, my muscles, my brain and lungs and heart; some necessary part of me that I could no longer bear to part with, just like my fifth limb.

The year before, when I made mistakes and wounded people and got into trouble, it was rare that I would ever think about it for too long, if at all. Everything could be rectified with a shrug, a sheepish smile, a half-amused and half-sincere apology.

There was something fundamental that had shifted in me since that last year. Something more intense, something less forgivable, and I supposed that it could've been because of many things, but there were two things that I came to blame. First, the fact that I suddenly felt much older than I was, as though I had aged years in months, and, second, the fact that I had finally acknowledged the intensity of my feelings for Bradley, no longer allowing myself to excuse them merely as a sign of our deep friendship as I had until then.

My feelings for him had not occurred to me out of nowhere. I had been almost unconsciously accepting of a vague, passively acknowledged attraction to him as far back as freshman year, if not further back than that. It was not a surprise— when I finally allowed my feelings to roam free, to fill my heart and possess me— that they were as passionate as they were. There had been no singular event or action that spurred me into infatuation. It was not infatuation at all nor had it ever been.

Rather, it had lived inside me for years and gradually developed, lingering, crawling and growing. It was like a planted seed, rising through the dirt and becoming a stem, stretching leisurely towards the sky until the bud formed and bloomed open, petals flourishing around it.

Sometimes it was as though there had never been a time before it; the seed had been planted as soon as we met and lay dormant inside me for years, growing discreetly and shyly until it was strong enough to be noticed.

After that, I began paying attention— perhaps too much attention— to the touch we shared; our knocking shoulders and bumping knees, the back of his fingertips brushing against my own and the jolt in my heart that followed, the comforting weight of his head on my shoulder and the way his hair tickled my neck, the way he gripped me and pressed me against him when he hugged me, the subtle shifts in his posture when I ruffled his hair and teased him by daring to tug it, the way he shuddered when I pressed my palm to the nape of his neck and how he smiled, boyish and shy, when I gently knocked my fist into his cheekbone.

Our play fights began to rouse me so I started them intentionally and often. The memories and images of straddling and being straddled, pinning down and being pinned down, and the feeling of him pressing against me, all made my head spin. The noises he made— the hushed panting, the soft grunting, the quick and quiet moaning when I pushed against him and gripped his wrists— were enough to make me dizzy.