Why I Don't Love You Now

I cried in the car, there next to you. We were in the parking lot at the bank, and the street lights were painting the side of your face bright yellow.

The engine was still running, and I was thinking about how the exhaust pollutes the environment just like your memory pollutes my thoughts. My head is full of poison.

You are devouring your quesadilla and bean and cheese burrito in a way you never devoured me. There were times I would’ve given anything to be a tiny dollop of sour cream on the side of your mouth. At least then, when you licked your lips, part of me would be inside you forever.

Instead, I got stuck with your taste in my mouth all the time.

But that night, in the car, with me like a limp piece of soul on the seat beside you, something changed. I spit you out.

It wasn’t easy. Four years of hanging on to every word and every hope, moving to another country to try and escape the hold you had over me, these things were not easy.

But since you just sat there, a frozen piece of flesh, something in me saw, for the first time, what you truly are. You are a man who doesn’t love me. A man who doesn’t want to feel the warmth of my skin. You don’t want me to rush into your arms after a day apart, and laugh as I tickle your earlobe. You used to look at me in a way that said everything without saying a word. You used to love me.

Somewhere, in a tiny corner of my heart, I felt it. But it was never enough. It never filled me. I was always aching, hungry and desperate for more. More never came. Only anger. And isolation. And loneliness.

So as we sat in the car, me telling you how much I still yearn for you, and you ate, quietly swallowing a piece of something that was not me, I just stopped. Everything stopped. Me loving you stopped. Me wishing you were different stopped. Me longing for a part of the past that never really existed outside my mind stopped.

And now I am done. We are done.

People who watched me falter along the way, tripping so many times over empty promises, they don’t believe me. How could they? I kept running back, every time I’d get far enough away, flinging myself into the arms of a man who didn’t want me there. And every time I’d feel that truth, I left.

“This time it’s for real,” I’d say.

It never was. But now, as I remember how cold the leather felt on my skin, how washed out the street lights looked against your mocha-colored skin, I know something has changed forever. Because there is a man here, in my new city, who doesn’t look anything like you. His smile is bright and he spends all day telling me what he likes about me. Mostly, it’s stuff about my soul and my spirit, the way I am kind to people. He notices things about me no one ever has, and when he wraps his fingers around mine, I feel like I’m on the inside of a beating heart. It feels warm and alive. There is no more heaviness. No more self doubt. No more working so hard to be noticed.

Instead, I’m just me. And I like that me. She smiles more. She feels like skipping sometimes. She doesn't feel unwanted.

She feels like she doesn't love you now. And that feels pretty good.