A Story About Putting Your Faith In Something (A Story About Disappointment)

I am a woman writing a story called ‘That Night’ so right away I have to tell you I wasn’t raped. This is not that story. This is about another kind of death.

This is about the week I was in New York last summer.

This is about how I sat in the windowsill of my apartment and sent him Snapchats of the city. This is about the way all those Snapchats were captioned “i miss you” and how I meant it.

This is about the way I did the brave thing. This is about the way I liked him when I didn’t deserve to like someone like him.

This is about the way I’m insecure, the way I made him pursue me so I could know he was attracted to me, that I wasn’t forcing something into existence.

This is about the way he made me believe.

This is about the date we made for when I came home. The food I planned and bought and prepared. The floors I scrubbed.

This is about the way I played that Eric Church song on the plane, the one about about coming home to your lover after some time on the road. This is about the way — for the first time in as long as I can remember — I let myself be excited.

There should be a word in the English language for when you have a specific fear about something and that very thing comes to fruition.

I played a game when I was a little kid with an anxious soul where I told myself if I worried about something, it wouldn’t come true.

This is a good game for anxious children with irrational fears.

This is not a good game for adults who have worries about things they deserve to be worried about because they may very well happen.

This is about how the night that I looked forward to was made of porcelain and I should have known better than to love something so fragile. This is about how I should have known better.

This is about the way the food wasn’t good enough.

This is about the way he wished we’d just gone to his house like we usually did.

This is about a bad experience. This is about how I don’t know what else to call it but a “bad experience” and apologize because it’s really not that bad of an experience as far as experiences women have go.

This is about a series of things he said about my body during and immediately after we had sex. This is about how I can’t write them out. This is about how I haven’t been able to tell my therapist about them because of the shame I feel about being a girl who has let someone say things like this to her. This is about how I still think those words “probably aren’t that bad” and that I’m overreacting. This is about how I am waiting for every guy to say those things.

Yes, the crux of it is that this is about how I am waiting for everyone else in the world to say those things.

This is about how when they don’t say those things I think they are lying.

This is about how I don’t want to be a baby, but I don’t know what else to do. What else can I do?

This is about the way my ex-boyfriend told me I play pretend because I like to believe nice things about people, that the world is good and the people in it want good things for each other.

This is about still trying to believe good things and feeling like a child because the world is probably not good. This is about wondering if I am right or if everyone else is. This is about not being able to tell anymore.

Pre-order your copy of Chrissy Stockton’s new poetry book, We Are All Just A Collection Of Cords, here.