Trapped in Forever

61 ~ I Didn't Mean For This To Happen

I wasn't sure if avoid was the right word to describe how I felt about Orion, or if ignore the exact word to label how I reacted to his random phone calls during the evening when he probably felt like talking about the other night, asking me questions I wasn't sure I was prepared for, equipped with the answers that Reese probably held continuously on her tongue in case of wondering boyfriends who fingered collar bones or mothers who dubbed you as unlike yourself, as if this was some kind of a sentence. I told myself that I was just waiting, waiting to finally meet him at Mo's or at his house, waiting to answer the phone when he called, waiting until I felt the reassurance of the answers prepped and ready within my mind, answers that would sojourn his worried glances and the tips of his fingers trailing over the parts of my body I felt most insecure, the shiver that rolled up my spine not from pleasure but because I was imagining him and his thoughts, thinking that there was too much fat there as his hands rested on the sides of my waist or his palm would land on my thigh, or that my skin stretched over my bones as if it were a trash bag, stuffed to the brim with garbage, rims of paper plates and rotten leftovers poking through the material, so ugly that it would make his breath catch in his throat, stifling the urge to jerk back his hand from me.

Somewhere within me, I knew that Orion wasn't the kind of guy who would analyze my visible body fat content or rest his palm on my thigh so he could secretly gage how much longer he would have to wait to show off his girlfriend and her five inch thigh gap, or grumble to his friends that his girlfriend so fat that he was thinking of renting a truck to take her places, but a little piece of my mind remained unconvinced of this. Unconvinced that anyone, even him, could stop himself from inwardly shuddering at the softness of my sides or the pudgy flesh of my fingers as he grasped my hand, and it reminded of Roxanne, and how her pica spread to the mirrors in the girls' bathroom and to the nasty lips of girls who wrote the messages on the bathroom mirrors, and that Roxanne had once told me that he would be okay with it, that he was that kind of a guy. She was convinced of it, certain, but soon she was scrambling to pick up the pieces that were shattered the night she told him that she loved him, the night he said it back, the night that she responded with the avowal of her pica.

And the thought of ending up like Roxanne, in that way, frightened me more than anything. More than ending up like Kara and collapsing on the creaking and uneven floorboards of a high school stage, but the thought of finding myself on the bathroom mirrors, on the nasty lips of girls who snickered and mingled sarcasm and venom in their words, and finding the words to describe how fat I was, how I would always be fat, or that maybe I could be skinny someday but I'd still be ugly anyway, and the thought that it would be because of Orion, that that betrayal would start from his lips and then I would find myself drowning in the remnants of Roxanne's mess terrified me more than anything. That I would find myself buried into the words that people would dub me from their cruel lips and my fingers digging into the dirt of my six foot deep grave with the nausea of betrayal churning within me as I looked up and saw him standing over him, repeating the same words he had said about Roxanne.

I didn't mean for this to happen.

Whenever I would ignore one of his sporadic phone calls or leave his text messages on my phone without a glance, my eyes purposely blurring the letters of the excerpt underneath his alias of Bruce Wayne that the screen would reveal as my cell phone vibrated, not wanting to even read the words of Orion's disgust for me, the distain in his pixelated message because he couldn't believe that someone would do that to themselves for the sake of vanity, but those few words, that small sentence—I didn't mean for this to happen—was beginning to mean less and less within the corridors of my mind. The thought of him murmuring those words again over my own grave, a mound of dirt mingled with a couple of gray pebbles and snipped blades of grass concealing the casket that contained my body, glancing nervously towards someone just as close to me as I was to Roxanne, like Kara or Reese, feelings beginning to sprinkle themselves over top of his grief again. He wouldn't meant to tell anyone that I vomited after eating, or that I was so small in his eyes, or that I must have had a problem because not only was I dating him, her old boyfriend, but I was modeling just like her, so it was obvious that I was mentally unstable already. He wouldn't mean for anything to happen.