Sometimes I Honestly Wish My Love Was Boring

I think his eyes were blue

Or maybe they were green. Or brown?

Or maybe I didn’t actually pay attention to his eyes enough to actually make note of what color they were.

I’ll never know if he had his mom’s eyes, no matter blue or otherwise, or his dad’s laugh or if the little split second beats in his sentences come from nature or nurture. I’ll never know if he prefers cats to dogs, or if he’s afraid of heights, or how he takes his coffee. I’ll never really know anything about him.

I’ll never know him or know whatever ‘we’ we could have been because I watched him and the details that were all his slip out of my front door at 1 AM.

And I watched him slip out the door without so much as a goodbye because I knew that I was too much for him.

I’m always too much of something. Too loud, too emotional, too sporadic, too unpredictable. I’m too neurotic, too messy, too much of a girl for anyone to handle. I’m always too much, but never enough.

And when a boy is almost boring in his predictability and his calm, when he lingers on beige and I’m always red or green, a girl like me is never going to fit into his arms or in the space where he opens his lips to kiss me.

It’s not for lack of trying, oh no. I’ve tried to quiet myself down and mold myself into the kind of girl you could bring home to meet your mother. I’ve tried to dull myself to be easier to take, easier to figure out. I curse at myself to use my inside voice and I constantly berate myself for over-thinking. I only cry inside the safety of my bed where no one else can see the tears and judge what might be causing them.

I wish I knew how to sit still and how to be comfortable. But I think I’ve spent so much time in the in between, so much time being uncertain that at this point it’s all I know.

I try to have easy love, boring love. The kind of love that isn’t written about in poetry, or on walls that witness fighting, or that lingers in scars that cover my heart. I try to have the kind of love that comes from comfort, comes from quiet.

And every time I fail.

I fail in fighting, by never backing down. I fail in never apologizing for displaying my pain and my past, and making no promises to keep things to myself. I fail in falling hard but not finding the words to say, “I care about you,” without the assistance of a keyboard or a metaphor in hand. And I fail in my inability to accept quiet love because I’m always looking for the next thing to shout about.

But I’m always afraid that my fingers will hover above the volume button on the remote, and that my arms will unintentionally slam doors. I whisper when I want to yell and I sit on my hands to stop them from shaking. I tip toe on floors for fear of stomping, and I refuse to touch hearts because I see them bursting before my eyes.

Because big, bad, messy, loud love is the only love I know; and I don’t ever think I will want to be still.