Work Text:
I don’t believe in predestination because I don’t think it was fate that I was born a billionaire or anything to do with some great quest for humanity that I was given fame. I think I was very, very unlucky. I think the only people who pre-determine things are our fathers, who decide when we’re young to beat us into submission and marry us off to strangers to better their own fortune.
We both know that neither of us wanted this marriage. We both know we tried to make it work. But I think sometimes about how you would take a napkin and dab at my face while my nose bled, like I was a baby who had just burped down my front. And I think about when I smashed the TV because I was too drunk to be playing video games, you just took my trembling hands and laid me down in bed, got me water and helped me hook my phone up to the speakers so I could play MCR.
I remember when dad told me I was going to prom with you, pinning the corsage on your dress all crooked, so bad your mom redid it for me. I remember how red your face turned after she handed me a condom and winked. The way you folded me down to fit in your pocket, like origami out of receipt paper. The way the pacifier you bought me, my first, sat between my teeth, like my empty mouth had been waiting for you to give me something bigger than your clit to fill it with.
And I told you to leave, that was my bad, but I felt at the time that I had to make room for bigger things, bigger people, new opportunities. I wish the apartment had been big enough for all of us.
At night I still lay awake and listen to my bedmates snoring, thinking about how you never made a sound while you slept. The soft, feminine sighs you would make. It makes me miss you. As much as I try to ignore it, many things about them make me miss you.
I keep coming back to the same phrase, lodged deep into the hole in my heart that you left, like a mantra of regret and aversion to change. Goddamn I could have loved you better.