With the shower running and the steam filling up the bathroom. It’s me in his navy blue t-shirt at 4 am. And it’s him who has placed me on his bathroom sink, and his hands who are cradling my face. And he’s telling me to look at him, to look into his eyes, while mine are tearing up. I can blame it on the martinis, but I know it’s something else. And I wrap my arms and my legs around him, and he wraps his arms around me. And he repeats himself. To keep looking at him. To look into his eyes. And I don’t want to, for some reason. Because if I do, this will all mean something.
Defeat, maybe.
But they keep watering. And it’s getting harder to concentrate, to catch my breath. And I have tried my best to look anywhere else, I really have. The ceiling, the floor. But he keeps telling me to look at him. And so I do. I am shaking, but I do.
-
I think back to when I first walked on Via Giulia in the late summer of 2021. And how he had told me that he had broken up with her. But I didn’t care. I had changed. I had discovered something. And maybe it was the heat, and how empty the streets of Rome were that August. But it was something. It was magic. I was magic. I was following something, I was creating something. I wasn’t waiting around for anything, or for anyone.
And I think about that morning in April when he first came over. And how he told me that he doesn’t usually do this. Open up to people. And I said that I don’t usually have strange men in my apartment the morning after I meet them. But there was something about him that I trusted. And I think about how relieved he looked. And so I asked him. “How do you not feel guilty for living the life you always wanted?” And that’s when he answered, “That battle never goes away, Emily.” And that’s really how it all started, I think. The letters, the men. All of it.
-
I let him hold me on that January night. He noticed I was shaking and he ran me a hot shower after. I wasn’t cold, but I just knew that something had changed. Like something in the universe had shifted.
I don’t want him to let me go. I never really wanted him to let me go. After 8 years, you see me as something more, right? You have to. Tell me something more than how I was never boring to you. Make me think that I was something.
Was it always love, or was it always control?
I had never seen him like that. Telling me to look at him.
I don’t have to look at you, I wanted to tell him. I already love you. And you know this. And I know how this is going to end. And you know this, too.
I think of how all the windows broke in our dreams. The waves crashing in, the broken stained glass. It’s all really beautiful, but “it happens all the time” I tell my best friend as water fills the place.
Broken illusions, truth. Vulnerability.
I know he is trying to psychoanalyze me, when I tell him a story and the same smirk appears on his face when I say, “And he had a girlfriend too.”
I don’t think anything makes him happier than my failed relationships, or what he perceives to be failed.
And I know he is dying to say, “You see - we are exactly alike.” To prove to himself that I will break his heart, too. “You like the men who are just as unavailable as you. So you don’t have to start answering to anyone.”
But that’s not it, I tell him in this imaginary conversation. That’s really not it. It’s just that I’ve always seen the truth. I’ve always seen things for what they are.