on the awfulness of unrequited love
Unrequited love is exhausting, almost physically draining, like teetering on the edge of recovery after being home sick for two weeks. But the problem with unrequited love is that there’s no cure, no chicken soup or bedrest to make you feel better again. The heart is a fickle organ, the most unpredictable in the body, and it wants what it wants for sometimes unknowable reasons.
Imagine what it must have been like for Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, just trying out their hearts for the first time. No instruction manual, no step-by-step rules that laid out the foundation and the uses. And if Adam didn’t love Eve, or vice versa, there would be no one else to project that unused love onto, no placebo.
When you see the one you love with someone else, it’s all you can do not to rip your heart out and throw it on the floor and declare your love to the whole world, to smash every plate in the cupboard or paint the walls with their name. It’s gut-wrenching, like asking for the whole universe and only receiving the stars instead.
And of course, if your love is unrequited, you sincerely believe that this person belongs to you, that they are yours. That you love them quite possibly more than it is possible to love someone. It’s like a Matryoshka doll: you can fit so much feeling inside your own body, again and again, layers upon layers going down, down, into the deepest parts of yourself. If someone were to unpeel you like an onion, they’d find all that unreturned love built up like great yellow reams of fat, insulating your kidneys and lungs, clogging your arteries. You’d never be able to escape it.
Sometimes you lie awake at night in bed and imagine all the things you could have said or done or been, the things that might have changed the course of fate and steered the ship of destiny in your direction for once. But unfortunately, while we have all the maps in the world for faraway countries or oceans or mammoth caves, no one, in the entire course of human history, has ever charted a path for unrequited love and how to find your way out of its forest. The first explorer that does so, and quite possibly the only, would most likely have an entire continent named after them, an entire island, an entire universe. Because the one person who figures out how to escape unrequited love’s grasp is truly a genius.
And sometimes you look at their picture over and over again in your school’s yearbook, flipping the pages but always returning to that one face, the smile you believe is meant for you, the hair parted just so, the smooth curve of their neck where it joins their collarbones.
You’d write their name upon the stars if you could, but for now you’ll just have to settle for jotting it down in your tattered notebook instead.
Unrequited
When I meet my unrequited lover, he is only looking for a fuck,
so I give him one in the back of a moving car, our bodies folding together
like compactable seats, his heart so hot against my fist
it could be a knot of light, a small ripe plum exploding into red juice
beneath my tongue. In June, I survive on his two texts
asking where we can meet up again for another one.
Today I nail the stars of his gaze into my palms like crosses,
bear their weight heavy upon my eyelids;
today he goes to see his girlfriend in Tucson
and takes her out for dinner at a five-star restaurant,
where they feed each other creme brulee by transferring the spoon
from one open mouth to another.
Dogs can pick up frequencies so low that the average human being
cannot hear them, signals so soft they could be whispers
that set off a round of frenzied barking around the block.
Tonight, I strap all my greed and longing to my torso
like a straitjacket and wear it pretty to bed,
where I conjure up his image, red-haired and lithe, stretched out somewhere
in a cold hotel room with his girlfriend, two pale bodies,
a pretzel of limbs-I pretend these hands are his hands,
touch every part I imagine him to be touching on her,
and wonder if he can detect me, pick up my frequency,
a puppy cocking one ear on a park bench.
If he can feel me, the two of us moving in unison,
connected in some obscure way like a string of coins
tossed into a fountain, the kind that turn into a wishing well
when poured down a loved one’s throat.
