Love Affair
People hate me. You might think that I’m just being dramatic, but really, people fucking hate me. I try and try to make people like, but I always seem to fall short. Dad says it’s because I’m too needy. Mom might say the same thing, but she’s not around anymore. I’ve had plenty of friends from a wide variety of sizes and shapes, but none of them seem to stick. I’m not too picky really: girls, boys, fat, skinny, doesn’t matter really. It’s tends to be their parents that are the fucking problem. Their parents always feel that our relationship, platonic or romantic, isn’t right for their child. They ask me to move it along, and eventually I do as they command. I’m never very happy about it in the end.
But then, I’m always on to the next friend.
Sara was different from the rest, she actually loved me back. This is my Romeo and Juliet story. Star crossed and all. People fought to keep us a part, and I fought back for the first time in my miserable little life.
I’ve never been particularly attractive, nor athletic, nor much else which one might consider desirable. I’ve always been adept at making friends out of enemies, but it never really leads to much. And it usually falls to pieces shortly afterwards anyway. I’d say fuck it, but it seems to be stuck deep as a part of my nature, like something I can’t really stop myself from doing. Maybe it’s the same as being addicted to a drug or something. I like making friends, but keeping them is beyond my control.
Sara was the first time I thought one of my friends would stick around for the long haul. She was a beautiful person, inside and out. I won’t bother with a physical description since anything I might say would fall short of reality, and that would be an injustice for which there is no forgiveness. Suffice to say she had my heart from the very beginning.
I met her two months ago, and this is sadly my longest friendship, relationship, or whatever other fucking “ship” there might be that would eventually sail without me as a passenger. We kept out meetings secret, neither of us wanted to risk her parents trying to tear us a part. She didn’t want her friends at school to know either, which I was fine with really. I wasn’t really much of a fan of her friends anyway.
In the beginning it was much like the Biblical creation story, there was light. It was the most brilliant light I have ever known in my many years of life. She made me feel alive more than any person I have ever meet before or since. She and I would meet late at night and just talk for hours and hours. She was interesting, smart, funny, and above all, she made me feel better about myself. Nothing has ever made me feel like that…worthy.
Weeks passed and there came the hushed whispers around town that Sara wasn’t acting like herself. The salon gossips and quilting circle hens squawked that it was probably drugs, might be some man that’s making her skip school and act like a hateful little shit. “Little shit” is a direct quote. What kind of people call a beautiful person like Sara bile like that. It was completely disgusting really, I’d have taught her a lesson had Sara not gotten to her first.
She had gone to the salon in question for a trim, which she didn’t need. Placing herself in the chair she was covered in the drape which was to catch the hair. The vile bitch that had spoken those terrible words was in the chair next to her. Sara couldn’t help but let her eyes wander over repeatedly, and the woman took notice. The minutes ticked by, and both Sara and the woman became increasingly irritated with one another. The woman because Sara was staring at her, and Sara for the obvious reasons mentioned previously.
So, story goes that Sara seemed a woman possessed as she sprang from the chair. Without question she was in the woman’s face asking her reasons for the insult. She pretended to be stunned, but I had heard and told Sara of the woman’s trespass myself. Sara knew for a fact that the woman had made the comments. She scratched and punched and slapped, it was a beautiful display of violent revenge. The woman got what was coming to her.
After the salon things became tense between Sara and her parents. It was a while before she and I met in person again, but we talked nearly constantly. There wasn’t a single day that my voice wasn’t in her ears and hers in mine. There were days where my words were on her lips and hers were on mine. Then it all began to unravel.
She told that her mother had found her diary, and that it was filled with passages about our love affair. The late nights sneaking around. Ravings about the woman from the salon. And finally, there was my name, at least the name she knew me by, “Neil.” It was found on nearly every page she informed me, and this made my heart soar. I was finally worthy. To my knowledge none of my other friends had ever written about me in that way.
Sara said that there were pages which were filled with “I love Neil,” “I [heart] Neil,” and so on and so on. Her mother began to feel that I might be the problem and she made it a point to tell Sara that it might be in her best interest to stop seeing me. Cut it off I believe were the words she had so carefully chosen. But Sara and I were having none of her shit, and we told her so, together, for the first time.
The coming days were tortuously long, and there were people attacking us from every angle. Mother and father were simply pleading with Sara to leave me. Other friends and family were making attempting to guilt trip the two of us using the “hurt” and “pain” we were putting her mother and father through. I was a serious fucking laugh, for the both of us. You really should have seen their faces when she and I laughed in unison. You’d have thought someone had jabbed them in the stomach with a white hot fire poker.
Being that hardly anyone really notices me until someone befriends me, I used that anonymity to watch people, and listen. I knew things that no one thought I would, and I told her these things which she then relayed to those around her trying to tear us a part. Their shocked expression was all we needed to know when we’d hit the mark. The fork jabbed in their side, we’d begin to twist.
Some days were easier than others, and people would leave us to ourselves from time to time. Mostly we’d spend our days locked away in her room. Lying in bed I’d hold her in my arms while we talked. There were times when she would begin to question our relationship, and our methods of defending it from the attacks of others. But it would only take a few short minutes and some kind words to make her settle back into my embrace. I loved her so much, and I knew what lay ahead for the both of us.
Her parents decided that they were going to play hardball and brought in another man for her to love. He was tall, dark, and handsome. He was much younger than me and seemed to be everything I was not. I hated him from first sight, he was a pretty boy asshole and I was a big toothed nerd.
This is how the end begins.
The bastard came into the room without knocking, parents in tow. He wasn’t rough on the eyes, and maybe that’s why they always end up leaving. Greener pastures and what not. For whatever reason the guy kept asking us my name, and never seemed to be satisfied with the answer Neil.
Their arms were waving in all directions. At times their voices were so frantic in what they were saying that they appeared to be part of a Pentecostal congregation that had started speaking in tongues. To tell you the truth they looked to be possessed by some unseen entity. The display would have been comical had not the stakes been as high as they were.
“What is your name!!!” he’d begun screaming, “Tell me your name!”
“Neil, you fucking asshole, leave us alone!” I’d shout back.
At times she would chime in saying something similar and the effect of our voices together was something to behold. They were scared of us, and were we not about to give up the fight for our love. At least that’s what I told myself, but I sort of knew somewhere in the back of my mind that it was doomed to failure from the start. Eventually everyone I love asks me to leave. I don’t really know why Sara would have been any different.
Towards the end of our relationship Sara and I had decided to have a bit of fun with her parents and the dumb ass, black suited ape they’d brought in to try to take her away from me. We’d stay up late into the night making such a racket that you’d have thought the whole house was about to fall down around us. Doors would be slammed, lights would be turned on and off, and we’d scream and yell like banshees.
Day after day Sara’s mother and father would call her black suited suitor in to tempt her into leaving me, and for a while it was met with staunch resistance. We’d say “fuck you” in every language known to mankind, and some that weren’t. It was the final fiery passion that so many love affairs find in the days before they die.
She was exhausted in the days that followed. It seemed that nothing I could say or do would rouse her from the drowsiness which threatened to drown her with sleep’s embrace. It was beginning, the end, I mean. The real beginning of finality, and I was desperately trying to cling to the woman I loved. My grip was failing.
Sara had lost interest in me by this time, and was starting to find me not only boring, but also felt that I had become too hostile. Most of all she began to use the word that my own father had always described me with, “clingy.” Fuck, I thought, here it comes again.
I was screaming at the man in black for what seemed like the millionth time that my fucking name was Neil, when she went and did it. This guy just never seemed to give it up. He was persistent for sure. I wish I could say the same for Sara, but she was at her wits end with the entire situation.
She told me that it was time to give it up. NO, baby, this isn’t over yet! Neil, she said, yes it is. Please. Why would you do this to me after everything we’ve been through? Because, Neil, I’m so fucking tired. I want you to go, please. NO, I’m not going anywhere, Sara! Yes, you are going to have to go, Botis, I want you to leave. NOW….
My name, my real name was what she’d decided to use that last time, and the black suited bastard started using it with a violence I’d seen all too many times. Leave this child of God, Botis, demon of Hell! The power of Jesus Christ commands you to leave this child! Blah, blah, blah, and on and on and on!
He kept at it for the next few hours, and eventually I decided to hang it was best to let her go. As they say, “if you love someone, let them go and all that.” I have yet to find the one that will return and prove that it’s meant to be. I thought it was Sara, but even she proved me wrong. Heart break is not exclusive to the human condition, it transcends and permeates everything. Humans are only beginning to scratch the surface of suffering, when it comes to suffering.
