Love is such an overpowering force in human life that we are ready to sacrifice too much for it. Even our own dignity. She was intentionally misinterpreting his actions and words. It was her only weapon in the battle; it armed her when facing the lust of love and the soul’s incurable loneliness. She became the archetype of a women who tears out her hair in grief over a paralyzing, one-way passion. Here, she shares her story with Sensa Nostra.
We met in November, in the featureless landscape of gray November. It was the ambience around us that evening. You know the feeling in a basement gig. It is dark and loud and you have to get really close to keep a conversation. My circumstances were boring during that time. I was restless but passive and nothing special happened in my life. I was still in school, met the same old people, and hungered for life to kick me. And then suddenly this figure was breathing in my face. There was something about him, maybe the perfume, or the shape of his hands, that attracted me; plus the ambience in the room. That was already enough for me to get trapped in gray November. And then, BOOM! That sudden kiss. From there I was an explosion of desire.
In the beginning there was nothing weird about us. We just followed the conventional chronology of love: bar meetings with intense drunk talks, and on the the third date we had sex. And then after about two months of these frequent but monotonous meetings I decided to bring up our story and get serious. I started to call him babyish things, asked if I could stay for breakfast the day after ,and invited him to my place. And as I got more intrusive, he got more distant. He was always busy and couldn’t find time for me anymore. Eventually he stopped answering my texts and calls.
I am a stable person. I make my bed every morning. Clean the dishes after dinner. Have good social competence. I’m never too drunk nor too sober. My freckles are symmetrical and my grades are good. I have myself and my life in order without being a control freak, and to be honest, there is nothing really remarkable about me. But this unrequited love our relationship created made me go mad.
It started with the texts. I had the truth right in front of me. The last maybe seven texts in our conversation were from me, without any response. The conversation window lit up green from the one-way messages. And it screamed at me to master myself. I refused to accept that he was ignoring me, so I always found excuses and explanations. I wanted to verify that his phone was turned off, and that was the reason he didn’t answer. So I called him from an unknown number.
He answered. I just inhaled his breath through the phone while shaking and waited for him to hung up. I knew that I was debasing myself even more, and that the pain would be double if I sent another message. But the pathetic hope that this message would be the one to make him realize he wanted me made me send another one.
I felt misunderstood. Didn’t he remember these wonderful nights of intellectual discussions and great sex? That I made him laugh when I wore that dress he said I looked so beautiful in? He just needed to meet me again to be reminded. So I went to this club event that he was attending on Facebook. I was not even nervous, because I knew that our love was mutual. He would realize it tonight. I convinced him to go outside and talk with me. I asked why he hadn’t answered me. He said that he had been busy. And of course that I should not take it personally. And stupid me I believed in it, absorbed every little proof of his love, and denied the irritation and avoidance towards me that he showed in his whole body. I felt a mood and bent over to kiss him. He turned his head away. I grabbed his jaws in my hands and forced my tongue deep in his mouth before he pushed me away and told me to stop. I should have told him sorry and left. But I told him he was oversensitive, and then went after him into the club. After more alcohol in my loneliness I tried to kiss him again. He looked at me with this face full of hatred, and left.
I lay in my bed and tried to come up with something that would force him to respond after failed tries. I wrote to him that I just came from the doctor, and that I really needed to tell him something. He called me then, and I don’t know how I dared to lie to him—but I thought that maybe if even biology demonstrates that we belong together, he would come back. I said that I was pregnant. I expected him to offer support during the ‘abortion’, or something. But you know what he said? He said, “I’m sorry to hear that. We should be more strict with condoms.” I was lying in my bed and got once again got all hopeful. He said we should be more strict with condoms, WE! As if we should continue having sex. And that was the worst. Once again I twisted everything around to make it suit my idea of the utopian love.
He never contacted me about it, never asked about the abortion or anything. Maybe he saw through it. We hadn’t met or spoken for weeks, though inside of me he was always present. I thought about him every second of the day and dreamt about him during night time. I bought clothes I imagined him to like. Listened to music I connected with him. Read his favorite books and walked around the area of his school, with the hope of bumping into him.
I was sitting outside a café when I saw his bandy-legged appearance in the distance. He was walking in my direction, and I made sure to look away until he got closer. But he never passed by. When I looked after him, I saw his back going in the other direction and around the corner. And I realized then that he had seen my self-conscious face waiting for him and chose to turn around. And you know what this madness made me do?
I started to run after him. When I got closer I didn’t know what to say. I just sat down breathing and almost came back to reality before I decided to do the most stupid thing. I took the bus to his place. I sat in his staircase, outside his door, and listened for sounds in his letter slot. Someone came in the entrance downstairs. I ran up to the other floor and sneaked over from the steps above. It was him. I got so nervous and wanted to puke at myself, for all abasement I put myself through. But this irrational, desperate me rang his doorbell. He didn’t open. He’d probably seen me through the peep hole. I should just have tell him “Fuck you” and then left, with the last little bit of pride. But instead I started to talk to him, as I knew he was behind the door. I told him that he couldn’t make love to me, say promising words, and then leave me alone in this. That if it wasn’t real love, what was it then? Otherwise he would never have cut himself into my body so passionately. I held this monologue before he said, “You are crazy.”
And I left. And that was the last thing I ever heard from him. He lately moved from the city.
I realized outside his door—perceived the craziness I was acting out, and the ridicule he had met me with. I think that the two months of meetings had to me been very esoteric and heightened. So intense and strong that I assumed he must have felt the same. Like, “I am feeling something very unique here with you; then you must of course feel the same.” And isn’t that very universal to how we presume the whole of reality? How we perceive the world so clearly that we assume it to be objective, assume that everyone else is experiencing the same world as we do? And it was the same with this love. I was so present in it with my whole mind that I couldn’t reflect upon his different experience of us.
These strong feelings I had were probably not even love. It was just a gross demand for stimulation in my life, and it was so complex that I organized it under an idea of love. In the end it was not even about HIM. It was about not giving up. To justify a lost battle where I refused to see myself as a victim… until I realized that I was battling myself inside my psychosis. Because love is like a psychosis, a self-injury obsession. Hope made me continue giving space to my own anxiety. I tried to circumvent the love. But it doesn’t work, no one can fool it.
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