It's Not Like it Was

“Hey Ash, can we talk for a second?” I nearly whisper. He registers the look on his face, mirroring it on his own as he registers my tone combined with what I said. No one in a relationship wants to hear their partner ask, “Can we talk?” It never ends well, usually with both parties in tears or rage.

“Yeah… What’s up?” I can see that he doesn’t know what to do, and the panic that’s setting in. He looks how I feel, maybe he knows what I’m going to say, maybe he doesn’t.

“I can’t keep doing this. I'm so sorry." I look towards the ceiling, willing my eyes to stop tearing up before looking back at him. You know the photos we take? I feel like one of them, it’s happy on the outside but never changing. We’re not changing.” My eyes drop to the floor and pick up on a red dot on the ground. I squint my eyes to see that it’s a small ladybug that has made its way into our home. It crawls slowly across the floor, making its way from the screen door that leads to our backyard, from which it presumably came.

He sighs, bringing my mind but not my eyes away from the ladybug, “I had a feeling this was coming.” So he did know. “I get it, we’re stagnating, but isn’t this what settling down is supposed to be like? We just, commit to each other because we’re in love and live a domestic life? I kept noticing you giving off weird apprehension whenever we went on dates, but it was never enough to make me feel like there was a problem. Apparently, my psychiatrist's brain had turned off when it came to us. Children don’t tend to have relationship problems.” He says, forcing a small laugh.

The ladybug stopped at the same time as my heart. Nowhere in my thought process did the idea that we weren’t on the same page even come up. My vision of being married was full of romantic dates to places like the beach or a fancy restaurant, his vision seemed to be eating dinner together on a daily rotation of the kitchen table and the couch.

Our friendships were what made us compatible, we had, and somewhere deep down still do, so much chemistry but our ideas of a future are apparently anything but.. We,,

How could I have not seen this? We talked about the future, in great detail even, all the places that we wanted to go and the activities we wanted to do. I guess it didn’t occur to me to talk about how I would emotionally continue.

“Relationships aren’t supposed to be like this. Dating or even being married is more than just coexisting. I mean look at my parents, they coexist, is that what you want us to be?”

“Firefly look at me,” Ash says, almost pleading.

Only the ladybug could see the tears that were forming in my eyes, I couldn’t meet his eyes, it would solidify the realness of this conversation and my heart was already cracking too much. Even though I can’t see it, I know that his face is full of sad, maybe there are even tears running down his face. His inability to hide his emotions, something I’ve always loved about him, has turned into something I can’t stand to look at.

“I…” my voice catches in my throat, “I can’t keep doing this.”

The lady has crawled onto my shoe, narrowly missing the large tear drop that falls from my face. With so many emotions coursing through my veins, I can see the things that I couldn’t before. While I was so focused on the fact that things were wrong, I never thought about why they were wrong. My purposeful obliviousness didn’t allow room for me to think about how to work on the things that were bothering me.

“Firefly,” he voices cracks, proving my theory that he too was crying. “I didn’t realize this was bothering you this much, I wish you had communicated this to me before it came to this, but we’re talking now. Please. I need you to tell me how you feel.” The desperation in his voice doesn’t go unnoticed, but the whiplash of feeling like I’m being reprimanded stops me from immediately replying.

I can’t feel my ankle as the ladybug crawls up it. My entire body is filled with TV static. Stupid ladybug doesn’t have to communicate with their boyfriend.

With a big sigh I lift my eyes to the counter in front of him, the closest I can get to his face, and do my best to tell him everything, “You’re my best friend, if I never saw you again I would break. I love the way we interact, you make me laugh until I nearly pee myself, and our friendship is something that I do and always will, cherish.”

Ash’s lips turn down into a worried frown. “Firefly this is starting to sound like a breakup speech.” He says with concern.

“No no , it’s not I swear,” I quickly say. “Let me finish please,”

“Sorry, my lips are sealed.” I look up enough to watch as he purses his lips, drags his pinched pointer finger and thumb across them, and throws the imaginary key away. I smile just a tiny bit, even as more tears threaten to spill.

“We don’t go on dates anymore, maybe walking down to the bagel store and eating dinner in front of the TV is enough for you, but I want more.” The words are unfamiliar as they roll off my tongue. Women are taught from such a young age that they aren’t meant to want more. Modern social media wants to tell you that it’s a thing of the past and that women are meant to stand up for themselves but what they miss is that society has looked down on women for so long. Women have been treated like plants, bear with me feminists, they are the essence of life. Plants turn the CO2 in the air, even the gas that we produce on purpose, and turn it into air we can breathe. Yet men haven’t watered us, we’ve been dying for so long, wilting in the corner of the room while we cling on to life. You can water us, give us fertilizer, or anything else the local garden shop tells you, but it will take a long time before we forget how we were treated.

“I want to go to a fancy restaurant wearing that skimpy blue dress you like and watch as you look hungrily at my ass. I want to sit on a picnic blanket at the field outside the airport and watch as planes fly so close to us that we feel like we can touch them. Even our sex life is nothing but an exchange of orgasms!”

I feel the temperature in my body rising with my frustration. “I love you, Ash, I always will, but I can’t sit idly by as our love wastes away. I know that this isn’t completely one-sided. I let it fester for too long. I just thought that it would magically get better one day. You’d ask me on a date, or I’d ask you, and we would be all better.”

Thinking about being in pain is one thing, but saying it out loud makes it feel even more real. As the words fell out of my mouth like hot sand, my brain started to work overtime to bring every thought I had to the surface. It moved so fast that I didn’t even know what would come out next.

I take a peek up to see him. Tears are streaming down his face, but he’s not sobbing. It’s as though his brain froze, but his eyes couldn’t help but spill tears down his face. This is what I didn’t want—I didn’t want to confront him because of the emotions it would cause. I broke our bubble of ignorance. My logical brain knows that this is for the best, and if I have any hope of mending what’s bent in our relationship, then this is the conversation that needs to be had. What I can’t get my head around is why something that will hopefully lead to good things hurts so bad.

“When we first started dating, not just flirting, I felt like I was on a cloud every night that I was in your arms. After years of learning to love you before we even kissed, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world that you were mine. There was no way that other people felt how I felt because it was pure ecstasy.”

I take a deep breath as I attempt to regulate my heartbeat and keep my own dam from breaking as I finally fully meet his eyes. “We spent months falling in love, but when we moved in together, it felt like time slowed down. We slowly moved from deep and meaningful ‘I love you to something that we said as we walked out the door or hung up a phone call. It’s almost as mundane as saying ‘Good, how are you?’ when someone asks how you are. I miss the way that we used to dance around the living room to the music in our heads, or how you held me at night until we both fell asleep. It’s like we’ve become roommates, our every move in the house a dance that we know by heart. It’s like we’ve gone back to square one.”

I get the last sentence out just as sobs wrack my body. I’m not even sure if the ladybug is still on my leg because all I can think of is the panic and sadness spreading through me. I fall to the floor, bring my knees up, and wrap my arms around them, praying the ladybug isn’t anywhere near me. I’m on the floor alone, my whole body shuddering as I cry. Snot runs down my nose and drips on the floor and into loose strands of my hair. Whoever made up the idea of pretty crying has never experienced an emotion in their life.

Despite my ears ringing from the shock my body is in, I hear the faint scrape of a chair moving back and Ash’s shoes as they stand up and walk. I feel him join me on the floor, his knee poking into my periphery in his criss-cross position.

His voice cracks as though he’s barely holding on as he rubs my back gently. “Ember, I’m so sorry. I…”

My sobs are slow enough for me to hear him properly, but my breathing quickly picks up the slack, embodying the emotions that I can’t seem to express.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” I stutter hard, as though my brain has turned into a broken record.

Ash has remained calmer than me, for once not bringing his feelings to the forefront. I hate that my own feelings are so overwhelming that he can’t express himself. I immediately hate myself for invalidating my feelings.

“Firefly, I need you to breathe with me.” He inhales purposefully loud. “1, 2, 3, 4,” his breathing stops as he says, “Hold, 2, 3, 4.” Then, with a big breath out, he says, “Out, 2, 3, 4,” and finally, he says, “Hold, 2, 3, 4.”

He repeats his breathing, making sure to be loud with his inhales and exhales. I try to mimic his pattern, sometimes struggling to keep up with my hyperventilating. He does this for a few minutes until I catch up and my breathing returns to normal.

“I won’t make you, but I would love it if you would sit on my lap.” His voice is so soft, as though I’ll break at any second. He was right—I might have broken, and his soothing voice was what I needed to stay together.

“You don’t look like Santa Claus,” I managed to get out.

“There’s my girl.” Ash has a small smile on his face as he looks at me. Even though he’s been in front of me this whole time, I missed him—I missed us. We haven’t broken down our barriers in front of each other in a long time, and I feel like I found him after being alone for so long. He’s looking at me, really looking at me—not as his girlfriend, but as Ember.

If you had told me that I said something as inane as “He’s been here, but I’ve missed him,” I would’ve laughed and said you had the wrong person. It’s cheesy, and I’m emotionally lactose intolerant. What I didn’t understand is that love is cheesy. It’s full of snuggling in public, feeling like a piece of your heart has left every time you go on a trip, and most importantly, committing to the bit.

Ash and I are two people, but I once heard that being in a relationship is the culmination of two whole people coming together to become something better. My need to be independent and be okay on my own made me forget that I don’t have to be. Ash is here for me, even in our lull, he has proved that to me time and time again. I might be frustrated that he didn’t say anything about my evident discomfort, but it’s also my responsibility to voice my feelings.

I crawl over to him, situating myself on him by plopping my butt into his criss-cross, wrapping my legs around his waist, and burying my snotty, tear-covered face into his shirt. His summer scent fills my nose, nearly making me cry again, but I manage to hold off. He wraps his arms around my back, pulling me in closer to him. He hugs me so tight that I might never breathe again and puts his temple to my shoulder.

“I didn’t know it was this bad.” He lifts his head and removes one of his arms to run his hand through his hair. “It’s worse than that—I ignored the possibility that things could be bad. We were content.

Here I am preaching about communication, and the importance of checking in on how the other one is doing, yet I failed to follow my own advice.”

I can see the frustration on his face, but I can’t tell him that he’s wrong. Communication is a two-way street that neither of us acknowledged.

“Even before I learned about it in school, I’ve made an effort to develop meaningful connections by communicating clearly. You know this—you’ve seen how I am with my friends, all of my cards are on the table. Or at least I try to lay them all out. After I knew the science behind it, I made it even more of a priority. I shouldn’t need a psychology degree to pick up on the signs that we weren’t talking like we used to. As much as I wish you had come to me before a meltdown, I’m so proud of you for telling me now.”