Captive

You unblocked me for four months. 

Those four months were a breeze in my shoulders, Like I had suddenly retired to rest after holding years worth of weight. I was no longer stifled with the incessant urge to check your timeline, a rinse-repeat I used to do with a conscientiousness one would only attribute to an intense routine. Instead, I check it once in every blue moon, at times where you escape the backburner of my mind and I inevitably remember you. Before anything else, we were lovers. Lovers in the loosest form of the word in the sense that we were both teenagers fueled by our preconceptions and flimsy understanding about being loved and what it meant to love in return. Induced by the high of the moment, incapacitated by the lows. It was a misguided attempt at romance, and I swear, whole body and bones, that I was more of a romantic before anything else. 

You showed me what love was like and I was eternally grateful because I had not known anything else. Because of you, I learned that love was a hand slithering across my bare thighs in the midst of quiet theatre, premiering a picture you had no intention of paying attention to.  It's learning that my body had other functions outside of my own, that it invoked and elicited reactions simply for being. It was learning that boys loved it when you talked about sex, a word of mouth that would give you a slap on the wrist in the confines of a conservative Christian Catholic school. You'd bring me to some corner of the Church where you promised people wouldn't see us and I'd oblige. Come your mouth on mine and a litany of reasons why we should do it. I don't know what you would've felt hearing what they all whispered among their breaths at lunch. 

Because of you, I learned to conflate love with discomfort, that the unfathomable and unshakeable feeling of danger was a trademark in every good romance. It was what the poets would say, and I was living reality as Shakespeare had intended. For days, weeks, months, on end, I'd wait for the opportune moment that you would talk about anything besides sex, that I would not be a soundboard merely for your isolated suppressions. That I could be more than tits and rehabilitation. The clock ticked, the time never came. 

In true fashion, we did not last long, after 6-months worth of an on and off spiral, where we loathed each other one minute and we pecked our lips beneath our friends' bedroom sheets the next. I realized soon enough that I could not rid myself completely of you, no matter how I washed and no matter how much I scarred. It was like you were tethered on my skin, a permanent mark reminding me of what has been and what will be, and there was nothing more that scared me than realizing than the authority you commanded over my entire being, the sheer power that you yielded over anyone else. 

Our conclusion did not signify the end. I watched as you talked to other girls our age, how you scrambled to beguile them by recycling every line you used to say. You spared me no details talking about who you've been up for, how things were escalating, and how you expect things to turn out. Our friends eyes' would glaze over as you went on and on those exhaustive tangents. Your desperation to appear less lonely was evident to everyone else but you. So blithely unaware of your anatomy, so lost in your own man-made struggle, I relished on those moments of your torment the most.

At present, I have expended every effort to completely block completely, and I'm at a point in time where I feel nearly invincible. I am no longer arrested in your clutches. Leaving felt like leaving, breathing.  You hold no bearing to my life more than just a flickering recollection, an arresting thought.