I Was Not Made For Loving You

Boys like you are soft. You look at me from behind floppy hair, with wide eyes and shy smiles. You don’t raise your voice or offer up more than an under-your-breath remark when someone else hits on me in front of you. Your pillowy lips graze my shoulders and whisper “I love yous” that you think go unnoticed because I’m sleeping. But I’m keeping my eyes shut because I know that’s what you want, because I know that’s what is kind.

Boys like you are full of metaphors. Your intentions are always hidden behind Jack Kerouac quotes and songs that you write but are never fully transparent about when it comes to the context. Instead of throwing your arms open and bleeding and saying, “Here. Here is where I want you,” you hide. Because the possibility of me running away is too much when you aren’t ready to pick up speed.

Boys like you are incomplete. You are stitched together with broken promises from other girls and you’re looking to me to close off the knot. You aren’t comfortable in your decisions, in your choices, and you look to other people for validation. You’re thrown off by the silence between sentences and the spaces that our fingers leave when I pull my hand back to my own body. You’re looking to me for the answers and I don’t have anything substantial to offer you to fill that void.

Boys like you are fragile. I count your ribs and the divots of your spine when you’re sitting shirtless on my bed and mentally make note of every exposed part of you and every, single way I could hurt you. I look at our expiration date and brace myself for the ways that I will break when you finally see that I can never be what you need. Everything about you is so delicate, so penetrable beneath your skin. And I am so much, too much and I think that I’ll ruin you.

Because girls like me are hurricanes. We are bold and hard and we destroy everything in our path even if the wreckage we leave behind was unfortunately unintentional. We rage through places and take people with us and even after we’re gone, they’re never the same. Their chests are left with the memories of what it was like to feel us wrapped around them, pulling them forward even when neither of us knew where we were going.

Girls like me are sleepless nights and drunken ramblings. We weren’t meant to get someone home safe because we can barely hang on to our own sanity. We’ll try to be there for you, to be what you need, but we’ll end up suffocating you with too much love or accidentally let you dry out in the sun with too little. We’re not about balance; we’re about extremes. And a love built on extremes will eventually go off like the bomb that everyone on the outside watching is bracing themselves for.

A girl like me is meant to go against the tide and fight instead of getting swept away. A boy like you is meant to float calming in the shallow end and barely get your cheeks wet.

A girl like me will forever be comfortable in being the one who feels more, who needs more, and who is in turn not needed. A boy like you wants give and take, wants to be able to pick up the phone and have someone actually answer it instead of letting it ring out of her own weird paranoia.

Girls like me are chaos. And a boy like you deserves someone to stand still with.

Girls like me are difficult. And try as they might there are too many boys who don’t need any more difficulty in their lives.

Boys like you are soft. And you deserve someone who wants to be enveloped in your every inch.

But a girl like me was never made to love a boy like you.