i'm naked inside my fear

October 28, 2002 | 6:02 pm
part of me wants to tell him i'll be with him so that he doesn't make that mistake.

the other part of me knows better than to do that to him. that's the sensible part, the caring part -- the part that would do anything to cushion his life and make him okay and fix him all up.

because when i met him, he was all drugged up and had just gotten kicked out of school.

i wouldn't see him, but we talked occasionally. even though he broke up with his girlfriend to take me out. i denied him and started dating somebody else.

when i finally came around, i cleaned him up. he quit using not for himself but for me, he studied not for himself but for me. i kept him out of trouble and he gave me everything i wanted.

everything that i thought that i needed.

he picked me up from school when i didn't have work. he was always at my house or bringing me to his. we'd go to highland road park, to the lsu lakes, to movies and dinner and football games and BBQs. ten school dances and senior pictures and he (not my parents) put an ad in my senior year yearbook.

and one day we got in a fight, and said mean things; we said it was over. i thought he meant it but he didn't; he thought i meant it but i didn't. i saw him at a bar with a girl and i assumed things (even though he left her there and drove me home that night) and for a solid two weeks before school started i lived in a haze of alcoholism.

and then came jared -- someone i'd known for a while but never spoken to because i was taken. a boy who noticed me but also noticed the diamond heart pendant i always wore.

the same necklace that i broke when he told me he was dropping out of school because he couldn't bare to come to classes that i was in.

and all the while i tried to do my own thing but i missed him, and during that time he missed me too but i didn't know it. and once i was involved with jared i was too stubborn to see that my relationship with jared was superficial and my relationship with him was not. i acted angry when he would call me at 3am and i was with jared, but in reality i wanted to crawl into a hole and cry.

i missed him so much.

and then he met a girl, around the same time i broke up with jared to be with him.

he told her he loved her, and he left her for me.

i started seeing him again but very casually, and then i was noticed by lance.

lance who was not a crush but more a goal - lance who i used to crush on but didn't care much for.

i used it to make him jealous and instead he drew away. he was angry that i wanted someone else's attention and angry that i needed more attention than he was giving me.

so i backed off. i pretended that i didn't need him and i secretly wished that he would come around.

and soon after he got in trouble and moved out of his mother's house. he moved in with a girl, just a roommate, nothing else.

it didn't take long for it to become something else. i have no doubt in my mind that he just got loaded one night and slept with her and started seeing her after that.

and since then, he's said he wanted me back. but how would it work? he lives with her, he works with her. is he going to get a totally new job and place to live just to be with me?

and the first time something goes wrong he would go back to her, and i know that.

and he thinks i look down on him when really i admire him and adore him. he thinks that because i worry about school and work so much that i have in my mind that i am better than him.

it's nothing like that. it's not like that at all.

i wish i thought it would work out, but i know for a lot of different reasons that it wouldn't.

but i wish he didn't need me around just to leave her.

he always said he'd marry me when i graduated from law school. he even says that now.

will he -divorce- her then?

what the HELL is he thinking?

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