I Attempt to Explain
By Mia Osmonbekov, 17, Arizona
I lied, darling. I’m so miserable.
I’m running through my shortening list of excuses, trying to reason my way out of the gaping hole somewhere inside the unmapped chambers of my heart. With your biology pragmatism, of course, you’re going to say the human heart only has four chambers, two atria and two ventricles, that pump the same amount of blood every day, every hour, every minute, keeping me alive. You’ll say that pain comes from the limbic system, and, perhaps more metaphorically, it’s all in my mind.
I don’t understand. I could spend the rest of my life poring over neuroscience literature, and still not understand why tears dampen its pages. I could study every branch of human science, I could excavate the remains of neolithic man, the psychological fears that go into microeconomics, the will to survive that propels people to find high-paying jobs. I could read every accepted Harvard essay, watch every emotionally-wrenching Oscar film, peruse the poetry of every cursed writer from Sappho to Sartre, from Hugo to Harper, from Oenopides to Obama, and come up short, wiping the snot from my face with a sleeve.
I don’t understand why the wirings of my brain make the smallest gesture limerence, while the wirings of yours see it as a small movement. How you don’t need to dig through every digital tome to find the right reel of adjectives to hook two phrases together, how words are just pixelated dots of ink on a blank page, and don’t splatter blackened blood in your eyes, or crumple up your face until you only see blurry salt water.
I hate your indifferent candor, I hate how it’s what I always wanted but shrink away from with disgust. I hate how I understand, I empathize, I can so clearly see what you mean, that your words are as transparent as microorganisms under a slide, and I can’t put in depth, or polluted intentions, or anything of twisted substance into them, and can’t split them open and find pieces of you inside.
I hate how looking through your eyes makes the world a bit more bearable. Quantifiable into clean-cut boxes, everything labeled and wrapped, Christmas without the holiday magic. Confusion labeled away into categories, not ripped into ribbons of agonizing hurt. Words carefully exchanged, translated into currency, just a means of communicating logistics and necessities, not flowering fields smited by smoking guns, not breathtaking silken shapes torn by time and space.
And certainly not words to wound me. I wish you could form words that haunt, enrapture, break and bend and rip and sew me back together with a flash of your tongue and a glint in your eye. Any twisted dance would be better than the silence that slices me open in bare halves, rots the sweetness of your presence. I don’t know what I want but I don’t want this. This passionless, grotesque death, no letter of explanation, no hastily scribbled note running with tears, no broken heartbeat in the way you dissect things until they fall apart completely.
Why can’t I be the repressed memory, the echo of laughter, the phantom eyes that betray your longing when you sleep, the ashes of a frozen warmth you keep reviving and stomping out? Why does it have to be me who sits in the trenches you dug and the wars you started while you roll in its spoils? I despise you with every bloody fiber of my being and yet it unravels with the smallest gentle gesture, melts away in the daylight of your smile.
How can I hate what I created? For you’re nothing like you really are. I only mourn the lie I constructed out of clay and rainfall and the dreams of a sensitive heart. I wish I never met you, but that’s like wishing I never saw every vivid color of the rainbow shrouded in violet mist, or the iridescence of a dewdrop, or the rounded orbs of starfire eyes. It’s like ripping out a burgeoning part of my identity, tender roots and all, for a paltry handful of fading blossoms. I hate you, but it’s a mirror of how I hate parts of me, parts that marr the reflection of you. Perhaps a heart of stone crushes one of flesh, and armor is a lighter burden than anguish, but then you’ll have won and I’ll become as empty as you started.
Or will I, darling? For I’ll remember your sunsets even when you’re gone, and nothing I’ve ever known can quench the blazing fires you started, nor silence the echoes of your voice that I still can’t drive out, and in some horrible way, don’t want to.
I can’t explain it. It’s in the stillness of the air after rain, the burn marks on a wooden spoon, the reminder of ancient fingers tracing hieroglyphics on tombs, the iconoclast shrieks of horror frozen in church glass. It’s in the cut-open scar between gift and curse, the invisible line between shadow and soul, the violence of sensual politics and losing your mind.
This story is a raw take on the emotional blows unrequited love can inflict. Often when we think of unrequited love, we think of silly crushes or faded daydreams. In reality, especially for people who are prone to limerence, unrequited love can be the greatest of pains, causing self-loathing, idolization, and unhealthy obsession. This piece is from the point of view of a young woman deeply infatuated with someone, confused about the intensity of her feelings and overwhelmed by her perceived solitude and his indifference. It’s addressed to him as an anonymous letter, and the title is somewhat misleading, because she tries to explain away her feelings but ends up even more bewildered.
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