I wish I was a girl

I wish I was a girl

“I wish I was a girl”, his shaky voice whispered into my ear. Subtle, suppressed sobs fill the warm darkness of the room. I hear how his voice catches in his throat, how he presses a hand over his mouth and suffocates in his own, personal misery. I lay stiff on the bed next to him, I want to break him out of his pain, a nearly parental instinct to tell him that everything is going to be alright in the end. To grab his face, squeeze his cheeks and tell him; “Look me in the eyes. You hear me? Everything will be fine” in a strict manner, to kiss his face and wipe his tears away. But I don’t. I keep pretending to be asleep.

“I wish I was a girl”, his voice breaks the fragile air of the bedroom again, he squeezes out the words, as if his throat has contracted to an alarming extent, as if someone is suffocating him, “I wish I was a girl, just so you would be able to love me”. My jaw tenses, my fingers dig into my palms, this night is long, this night is all too long. “I wish I was a girl, so you wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt of loving a man”, his shaky, troubled voice drowns in the cries he has to suppress, “I wish I was a girl, just so you would never have to leave me behind”. His voice pitches when the words catch in his throat in a high pitched whisper. He catches for air, careful to not wake me up. I have to dig my fingers further into my palms to not sit up then and there. I want to, but I don’t. Am I a terrible person?

“I wish… I wish… I wish. But it doesn’t matter what I wish for”, the sentence gets interrupted by his shaky, slow gasp for oxygen, “because you will never say you love me, because you will find a girl to replace me with, because you will never find the strength to face me”. I relax my hands, I have to softly bite my tongue. I feel the urge to yell at him, to tell him that it will never happen, that he’s wrong, to tell him that I… that I like him… but it hurts, it hurts me that he’s right… he’s always right.

“And why was I cursed with falling in love with you? Why do you have to give me hope, if at the end I will remain your deepest, darkest secret?”, I feel the way his hands grip the sheets next to me, I feel his pain, how it translates through the air, like a deadly virus. His tears hit me like electricity and his choked cries cut deep into my soul, shaking the fundament of my being. And I feel like the air is punched out of me, I feel like he pulls me down after him, into the depths of the ocean. Like the Bermuda triangle, there is no way out, you will keep sinking down until your corpse reaches the dark ground of the icy waters. The dark ground where the small fishes will slowly make you a part of their ecosystem, a part of their world.

“Love me… I beg for you to love me. I will get on my knees and beg you if that’s what it takes. I will do anything you ask of me, I will kill for you, I will die for you, I will live for you so why won’t you love me?”, the way he mutters it in a single choked, devastated breath. I feel how we both are reaching the ground slowly, but he keeps delusionally fighting out of the icy waters, while I have given into the cold, deadly embrace of the waves. „I can wear lipstick and dresses, I can grow out my hair and shave my legs so why can’t you be mine?“, he sounds crazy, but it’s not insanity, it is despair, it is delusional despair in the twirl of a breakdown. It is his way of desperately trying to escape the icy cold waters, it is his way of pulling my uncooperative and stiff corpse with him out of our misery. Fighting against the cold waves, against fate, trying to get me out of there with him. I know I said it wasn’t insanity, but love and insanity go hand in hand, I feel like we have blurred that line long ago.

His choked cries die down slowly, disappearing in the warmth of the dark, in the comfort of the night. I feel the way he sinks onto the bed next to me, I feel his tear soaked cheek press against my shoulder and his arms wrap around my torso. I feel his hand on my chest, his curls brushing against my jaw softly. He smells like a salty shore of the Atlantic ocean, he smells like freedom, but at the same time he is a captive, in a small, restrictive cage. He is a majestic whale, the king of the world, that I have locked in a fish tank next to my bed.

I feel his breath calm down, as he drifts to Morpheus’s kingdom slowly. Now I can open my eyes, I stare at the ceiling above us. He clings to me in his sleep, and I can’t help but feel like we are both just two pathetic prisoners, cursed for life. As his body presses against mine, I feel like we have sunk, we are now lying on the ground of the cold and salty ocean. He stopped fighting. Maybe he got tired. Could he have perhaps gotten out, if he wouldn’t try to save my unresponsive body? I lie on the bed, I lie on the cold sand of the ground of this Atlantic ocean, and he lies next to me. I watch the free fish pass us by above us, I watch where he could have been, what he could have been. I feel small fishes surrounding us, to drill our corpses into the sand, to make us parts of their eco systems

May our bones rest together on this cold, dark, sandy ground. The corpses of what wasn’t meant to be

Stop fighting you fool, there is not a single parallel reality out there, in which we could be each others for the better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health until death do us apart.

“I wish you were a girl too”, I whisper softly, “I wish you were a girl too…”