Valentine's Day
This is what doesn’t happen.
You don’t drive to my apartment and surprise me after work like you did 28 days ago. You don’t pull the box of macarons you ordered for me out of your passenger seat when I pull into my space. My mouth doesn’t hang open as you walk toward me with earnest eyes and a downturned mouth, like it’s not safe to smile yet. And I definitely don’t ask:
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
You definitely don’t answer with: “I’m so sorry.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“I heard that, but what the fuck are you doing here?”
You don’t sigh, dropping your arms to your sides in anticipated defeat. The macarons don’t bounce in their box against your thigh. “So I shouldn’t have come.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Your eyes don’t light up for a fraction of a second. Brown and gold in the setting South Austin sun, they’re not the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a month. Your face doesn’t look like coming home. I don’t add, “Why’d you come?”
“Because I realized I made that mistake you were talking about.”
“And your parents?” I don’t press.
“They were wrong,” you don’t agree.
And I don’t get mad. I don’t take three steps back from you and feel every ounce of rage that’s been bubbling up underneath my skin since you showed up unannounced and broke my heart into pieces small enough I couldn’t glue back together. My eyes don’t get hot and heavy with the tears I didn’t want to cry in front of you, and those tears do not, under any circumstances, cling to my lashes before dripping and curving under my chin. “How dare you,” I don’t say, voice and hands and lungs shaking. “How dare you come here and ask me to take you back. I know you haven’t asked anything yet, but I’m assuming that’s where this is going, and I just have to say: How fucking dare you?”
You don’t nod twice and start to turn around.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” you don’t ask, pausing with your shoulders canted.
“You put me through absolute hell, you know that? I spent every day fighting with myself not to talk to you. I almost drove to your apartment every afternoon after work, just so I could make you feel as completely awful as I did when you showed up here and broke up with me.” I don’t pause to take a breath, anger fading into something dark and intimate.
“I’m so sorry,” you don’t say, and I obviously don’t shake my head to make you stop.
“You hurt me. You hurt me in a way I didn’t even know I was scared of being hurt in. You lied to me and treated me like I was something to be thrown away at the first sign of trouble. You didn’t respect me enough to try to talk to me, like I wasn’t the person you talked to about everything for so long. I am so hurt. And how am I supposed to trust you ever again?”
You don’t stand there looking like I’ve looked the past three times we’ve seen each other. It’s not that quiet, resigned look—the one where you know you can’t change anything, so you just stare and decide to be okay with what’s being done to you. And then, you don’t say, “I’ll just…go.”
I never get the opportunity to say the words, “I didn’t say I wanted you to go.”
And we never walk up the stairs into my apartment, where we eat macarons and you spend the night winning back my heart. But most of all, we never kiss and make up. Ever.