Steel and Emptiness

A Story by Surrealist

Unrequited love

Steel and Emptiness

Forgetting about it is possibly the most difficult thing I have ever tried to do.

I spent an hour in the bathroom shaping my eyebrows because I want to be perfect, but somehow you don’t see my face or maybe you just don’t care. Well if time were love I’ve loved you for a long time. Something stops me from calling it a waste even though I know that nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. Obsession and disappointment has consumed me- I see things I wish I could have and then I wish I didn’t see them. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

I’m only happy when I don’t understand things. The human body, God, sex, death, machinery. Hope consumes me, rather, since I could waste away on the fraying threads of your shirtsleeves while they could have been sewn to mine. Then you changed clothes and I saw the truth. Damn truth. Science has shown so many truths to so many dreamers and they all wear the same face as me. Science took you, too.

Now I can’t be sure if I should strangle-hold the last thing I can hope for or cut it off and fix my makeup for a while. The truth also brings salty water, and my delicate eyes overflow with it on occasion. Maybe you were born knowing all the truths of the world, or at least accepting of them, because I’ve never seen you cry. Maybe you just do it alone. I still watch you, slant-eyed, and look for your car when I’m walking in town, hoping that you’ll see me and think about me or maybe even wave. I wear good clothes for you to wave at, and dye my hair the golden brown of yours so I’ll seem familiar. It still feels good to strangle it and hope that it cries out for love with its final breath. Anyways, regret has too many of my memories, and I don’t want him to have you.

When you told me the truth I don’t remember what else you said. This is where I imagine things and hope, that I can say I was important and worthy of sincerity, that I evoked a response, that I was noticed. I couldn’t do anything but stare. I feel creepy.

Indubitably you told Tyler.

And I understand now, I understand so much that I could write a book on it, I could explain the nuances of our experience of the truth, and I could damn such knowledge for the consequences of my future. God is statistically unlikely. Sex is chemically designed. My body is cloneable. Death happens to everyone. My subway ride is not magic- just steel and emptiness. YOU don’t like ME.

Yes, forgetting is taking away the truth and altering it, forgetting just makes me hope. I’ve given up on hope because it is just a word for lies, euphemism and bluster, the lies that made me so afraid of you and your truth. I knew the truth before you said it.

But I watched you anyways.

My eyes and your eyes met in a flurry of glances and awkwardness which made my heart race, your hazel eyes that Tyler said were boring, your hazel eyes that you hated in a Nazi wish for blue, your hazel eyes that I wanted to look at me. Sometimes they did but they never lingered. I know that you just couldn’t care. I know it. I know that you won’t ever care because you can’t care about a woman that way.

I don’t know why I hoped.

I’m riding the subway in my summer dress that’s a little too short and a little too low, exposed and tempting because I’m not sure how else to be. How else is perfect? I’ve watched all the shows, the magazines, and this is who they say people will want and admire. Obviously, this was not a truth, because this used to be the subway you’d ride, and you talked to me and showered compliments and I missed my stop to keep listening to your voice.

Maybe I’m a freak for thinking that the subway was magic, and you could love me, that there was happiness to be found in truth. But everything I’ve learned from you can be summed up succinctly: There’s nothing on the subway now but steel and emptiness.