Waking up is never the same. Well, 3:30 looks the same, and it feels the same as it sears the insides of my eyelids. This is before I even roll over and look at the time, before I even bother because I know it’s 3:30. Today it was 3:41, and upon looking through my recent call history, a lump rises in my throat and I swallow back whatever I can and roll over wincing as I coax myself back to sleep. Every night it’s 3:30, and every night it feels the same. Empty and dark, but mostly just silent. Before, 3:30 was easy because I could let it ring and hear voices, or mostly just yours. I realize today that you probably never noticed a pattern. Just disruption, just bad dreams, just a break in the silence you were so hoping for at that moment.
Nonetheless, waking up to the light that shines in to my room, never feels the same. It takes a minute for me to realize how I’ll feel today. Sometimes I wake up sad and pitiful, others I wake up angry, and others I find myself feeling like I might be okay and I might make it through this. It’s in the shower, with hot water pouring down my back as I stare at a shampoo bottle, hoping it has some answers, that I always realize I will be fine. I won’t feel this weak forever.
Today I woke up scared, and I know you’d tell me I always wake up scared, but today it was a different kind of scared. Today all I can think about is how you looked at me, amdist the sea of wooden desks and collegiate sweatshirts, how I could feel your eyes searing right through me, how I loved how warm it made me. I could never tell you about when I’m fairly certain you first tried to talk to me. You walked towards me, and I always deny seeing you, but I knew what you were doing. I know what I was wearing, for christssake. I felt you so close to me, and in this lapse of fear I pretended not to see you. I told myself that you’d simply think that I didn’t know you weren’t going towards me, and I feigned some weak conversation with the Spanish girl you never spoke very highly of, and quickly bustled out of the room. Granted, I had no where to go, I had class in that room again the next period as well. I never told you that, I never wanted you to know I knew, and today… today I’m convincing myself you weren’t coming towards me, that you never looked at me, because that’s easier.
It’s easier than thinking I’ll never be seen the same way again, that I may never have someone look at me like you did, that maybe someday you’ll look at another girl the same way you looked at me, that you’ll have the confidence to walk up to another girl and just talk to her like that, or reminding myself how somewhere along the line you stopped looking at me like that.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be angry, but today…Today I just miss how you always knew I was biting my lip, how out of my skin I felt the first time we were together, and how that didn’t ever seem to go away like you would think it would. Today I’m scared I’ll never get looked at like that again.
