bruises that won't heal

I dreamed about you last night.

You called me on the phone. The minute the sound of your voice hit my ears I felt a rush of surprise, excitement, and fear, all at the same time. You told me that you couldn't stop thinking about me and that you wanted to start over. "I can't help it, I really like you," you breathed into the phone. My eyelids fluttered as heart did cartwheels in my chest.

And then I woke up.

I spent the first fifteen seconds thinking that it wasn't a dream; surely you had actually called me and wanted to start something up again. How could I have even made that up? And that's when I realized I'd been asleep for the past 10 hours and that the last time you called, the trees were bare and there was still snow on the ground. My cartwheel-doing heart transformed into a lump in my throat. I felt embarrassed; I had promised my friends (but more importantly, myself) that I would stop thinking about you. But it's not like I broke that rule, right? I stopped obsessing over you. I trained myself to slow my breathing to a normal pace around you. It's not like I have any control over my subconscious.

Hahaha. God, this is a joke. I'm pathetic. I've perfected rationalizing to an art.

I can't control how I feel about you. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. It wasn't fair of you to just break things off all of a sudden without explaining yourself, especially when they were going so well. You caught me completely and totally off guard. I called you on that winter night, asking you if things were okay, and you couldn't even tell me to my face what you really felt. It took you two phone calls, one "yes, everything is fine," and seventeen minutes after we hung up for you to text me, "I guess what I'm saying is that I think we should just be friends." How did it go from "I really, really like you" to "let's just be friends"? I've convinced myself into believing that it's the distance. "We just live too far away from each other," is the only reason that keeps me from crumbling. Because if the reason is distance, it's not that you stopped liking me, you just found it too hard to keep going. And if the reason is distance, there's still a chance for us in the future. And then, we can still be friends and talk and flirt and make people question, "wait, is there something going on between them?" And if the reason truly is distance, it wasn't because you were scared off by my totally fucking weird personality or how much of an emotional mess I am or how I have nothing in my life put together. So I tell myself it's the distance; I tell others it was the distance, and "it was the distance it was the distance it was the distance" is the lullaby playing in my head every night.

Which is a totally valid reason to call things off with someone, right? And it's totally logical, and I shouldn't be upset, right? So I guess that solves it; it wasn't because of the distance. Because you're still not talking to me and I'm still in tears.