Unreal

I have these moments, sometimes, when nothing feels real. I could be walking down a hallway, a store, a small, crowded corridor... and I get so in my head, that nothing feels real. It’s all a dream, a mind trip that leads to nowhere and always ends, whether the sun comes up or not.

You don’t feel real. Definitely not when you’re towered over me, naked and breathing heavily.

You feel real, physically. I can touch you, and I do. I can’t keep my hands off of you. Your hair, it smells like soap and it feels like bits of soft, loose thread. That is, when it’s not gelled down and hard, which I make sure it isn’t by gently untangling it with my fingers. I love doing that. You love it when I do that.

You feel real, genuinely, when I talk to you. And I talk a lot. Politics, poetry, philosophy... I can’t shut up. You try and keep up, and you do... most of the time. You’re not stupid. I like that about you. No matter how much we like to joke around and act dumb, we always end up picking each other’s brains and discovering something amazing. It happened the first time we’ve made contact.

We talked, and talked, and talked. You know your silver-tongued, star salesperson self and you unleashed it immediately. I was intimidated. Awfully intimidated. But it grew, our conversation, our comfort. Our connection. It grew and grew and exploded when you tricked me into kissing you. It felt real, but only because I didn’t know you as well as I do now.

Now, I know you enough to consider myself extremely lucky. Blessed, even.

I’ve always thought that I was the type of girl to get flustered, nervous, sweaty in front of people I liked. Hell, I couldn’t kiss a girl I knew loved me because I couldn’t stop giggling. But with you, it’s different. It’s not butterflies. It’s warmth, sunlight, breath in my lungs and chest. It’s life restored, nurturing the parts of myself that I thought died. The parts of myself I thought I’ve killed. And it feels unreal.

Every time I wake up to a reminder to have a good day. Every single time I hear the phone go off and it’s you, it feels like a trance. What, oh, WHAT did I do to deserve you? God knows I’ve been a terrible person... why is he doing this to me now?

Perhaps I’ve been too hard on myself; maybe heaven likes cynical, self obsessed, somewhat talented narcissists that are way too honest for their own good. Maybe heaven is real and it’s nothing like we imagine. All I know is that if it is, you are from there.

Or... you’re not real.

It’s possible, you know, that you’re just a tumor in my brain and, like Sylvia Plath, “I made you up inside my head”. Or, maybe I’m in a really detailed, really realistic dream that hasn’t yet released me from its gilded grip. Whatever it is, a part of me hopes you aren’t real. Things in my life are too good to be real.

I’ve got a nothing job that’ll pay for occasionally fancy dates with my hot, amazing, hero-in-training boyfriend. I am earning amazing grades in college. I cut out all the toxic people in my life and I’m getting along with my parents. An apartment in the city, ownership of a bookstore and a few pencil skirts and blazers are the only things I’m missing from my idea of a perfect life. And it’s unreal. Everything is too good to be real.

You’re lying next to me on a tiny twin sized bed and somehow, you’re too far away for my liking. I want to be inside your skin, your head, your body. I make do with nestling in your arms. I feel safe, but somehow, not there, as if the floorboards will soon split apart and let me fall right through, like I’m disposable and you’re, well, you. I feel unreal and you feel strange on my skin, in a good way... I think.

It’s just that you’ve told me that I am amazing so many times that I have no idea who I am. You’ve called me gorgeous, talented, perfect... you couldn’t possibly be talking about the me I know. You hate when I react weird to your words, saying I don’t know how to take a compliment. You’re right. I don’t. I’m not used to it. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe you do.

The things you say, about my body, my mind... I don’t accept them. They scare me. They intimidate me, hanging in the air, instilling in me a fear that screams “if you screw up- even a little- he won’t think you’re all those things. You will break his image of you. You will break his opinion of you.” You can’t help it, but it terrifies me. It scares the shit out of me, ruining this, because I know that if we happen to split, it’ll be my fault. And that terrifies me.

Lying next to you, I feel like a fraud. My brain churns your words and rejects them. It turns them into threats and warnings- “Don’t fuck up. Don’t you dare.” I feel small, scathed by my brain and my fear of ruining the comfort and peace I feel when I’m with you- when you’re awake and you’re with me.

Thinking now to how you are with me, I’m convinced that you aren’t real. You’re fictional, or you’re a hallucination. Your eyes, the way their smooth brown maple pools black in your pupils, when your hands snake down, down, down my legs... and your little nose, how it crinkles when you laugh... that can’t be real, right? I have to be insane, right?

I said a part of me hopes that you’re not real. I meant it. You not being real would mean I wouldn’t have to worry about hurting you, about doing something that would hurt us. I would be off the hook and free to do terrible, horrible, immoral things like I used to, back to being the me that I recognize, not the polished, perfect girl you’ve turned me into. The parts that you’ve revived would die again and they will be no warmth, no sunlight in my bones. I will become cold. I will become deep, chaotic like the sea. And you would never ever have to worry, or call everyday or even miss me, because I wouldn’t be the person (I think) you adore. I would be the real me, the one we both buried when we met each other.