«dedicated to Mad for creating the prompt»
"He is a poem said out loud; I'm a word on the tip of someone's tongue."
I fidget with my sleeve, trying to be convincingly fascinated by the unraveling thread. To be honest, I do find the thread rather interesting. It is doing its best to keep the sweater together and maintain its little world in perfect order, yet here it is, being torn apart at the seams by a whimsical, irrational outside force. Funny how life works.
The girl across from me clears her throat. I remember she has been waiting for the answer to my question for a while now.
"I'm sorry; will you repeat that please?"
She groans and snatches up her pitiful peanut butter and jelly sandwich, working her fingers around the crust to peel it off. "Honestly, do you even care anymore?"
"Who knows?"
"You should!" she bursts, slamming her sandwich down on her plate.
I laugh. "All right, fine. I guess I don't. Why should I?"
"That's my freaking idiot of a brother you're talking about. You were both happier together." Her nimble fingers go back to work on her sandwich.
I laugh again. "Look, no one except you cares anymore. He's fine. Look at him. He got over it."
"No one ever got over it. They're all just pretending, those insufferable poltroons." Having finished with the crusts, she begins eating her sandwich piece by piece. I find myself mesmerized by the way she eats her sandwiches so methodically. I've been mesmerized by her little quirky routines since the day we met.
"All except you, I presume."
"Right. As I said, no one is over it. No one's happy anymore. They're just hiding it. You two need to get back together."
I sigh, turning my attention to my sleeve again. "They look just fine to me."
"As I said, they're pretending."
I sigh again. Desperation can lead to the most appealing conclusions, but they are often wrong and wishful thinking. "Even if they are," I concede, knowing that we would never move past this point unless I let it go, "I can't go back to him. There's no way I'm going back to that torture chamber."
"I'd say not being in that relationship is more torture for you."
"I'd beg to differ," I shoot back, tired of the argument. "I'm not going back to him."
She wipes her fingertips on a napkin to rid herself of the nonexistent crumbs from her sandwich. "How was any of it torture for you, anyway?"
I give a low chuckle. Apparently he never told her anything. "It was suffocating. He put so much pressure on me, but you wouldn't understand, now would you?"
She growls. "I won't understand if you don't tell me. I don't see what was so wrong with the relationship. As far as I could tell, all he did was push you a little so you could get out of your stupid comfort zone and live a little."
"No, not that kind of pressure."
"Then what?"
I don't answer for a moment, trying to think of the best way to explain it. "It was the pressure to be perfect."
"What are you even talking about?"
"Before him, I was a nobody. With him, I was somebody—barely. After him, I'm again a nobody. However, during my time as a somebody, I needed to make sure that I could live up to his image. I had to prove that I was worthy of being with him. The only problem was that it didn't work. I screwed up often. I was never good enough. No one took notice of me except to be shocked by my status as his girl. I could never compare." I can tell she's about to open her mouth and talk, but I'm not done yet, so I continue on.
"He was—is—everything anyone could ever want to be. And I just couldn't live up to that. People still don't know who I am, nor do they care. He is a poem said out loud; I'm a word on the tip of someone's tongue. People see him, love him, analyze him, love him some more, and remember him for the rest of their lives. He inspires people. I, on the other hand, am nothing but a sense of familiarity, common knowledge that someone has momentarily lost, something that no one can quite grasp right, and eventually they give up. He gave up. Now I'm giving up. Why won't you give up?"
She narrows her eyes. "You are meant to be together. Besides, you were never anywhere near nothing."
The sardonic laughter bubbles up out of my throat before I can stop it. "You are joking, right? The relationship is over. We're moving on. You need to move on, too, especially because this has nothing to do with you."
"It has everything to do with me!"
"As far as I can tell, it doesn't. Since when was the relationship about the three of us? There are you and I, and there are you and he, and he and I don't exist anymore. Just let it go."
"No!" she screams, attracting the attention of the whole cafeteria. "I will not let it go! Neither of you are happy apart!"
"And what makes you think we'll be happy together? You know, we tried, but our sadness together didn't really add up to happiness. I need you to move on from a relationship that doesn't involve you or anyone else for that matter anymore because I am so ready to move on with my life."
She looks like she is about to explode, though she already had. Instead of attacking me, however, she turns on her heel and leaves. I turn back to my sleeve.
And that's the end of it.
The funny thing about endings is that they're much like an unraveled thread. It's fun to fool around with until you actually reach the end of the thread, and you realize that now your sweater is a useless pile of thread. And you realize that you want it back to the way it was. And you realize there's no going back.
Funny how life works.
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