Girls Like You, Boys Like Him

I’m watching these events unfold through a window. I’m on the outside looking in seeing mouths moving, eyes glaring, hearts pounding, but hearing nothing.

It seems I’m picking up this story in its climatic ending, trying to understand the battle lines while knowing so little of what has happened in all of the pages that led up this one.

I feel as though I know you. I’ve constructed your character based on the shattered remnants of the heart he has given me, and now, with that heart in my hands, I am bleeding too.

I tried to keep my distance, to throw him a rope from the safety of the shore, yet here I am being dragged heart-first into the depths of your self-loathing. This is not my ocean. I shouldn’t be here, yet here I drown beside him.

I have a hard time understanding what more you could ask for. He gave you the world through his soft blue eyes and freckled skin, and I couldn’t imagine ever wanting anything more.

Maybe you truly loved him once, but now I know you only as a selfish lover; an oxymoron, a predictable tragedy. You broke his heart, pushed him away, kicked him after tricking him into begging on his knees for your mercy as if any of this was his fault.

You got what you wanted, so why are you punishing him for moving forward?

Girls like you are terrifying. Delusion is a lens that blinds you to reality, and you wear it constantly, coloring the world to your liking.

Girls like you can’t be reasoned with. Whatever is in your head is the only truth you will accept, and no matter how apparently the real truth lies in front of you, you will still lie in its face.

Girls like you want only power and control. You are a temptress disguised as a damsel in distress, drawing in and ruining all the heroes and the princes and the doe-eyed boys with kind hearts and naive minds.

Girls like you fall out of love but refuse to let go of the power it’s given to you. He is your pawn, and you are his queen.

Boys like him are going to stay. He wants more than anything to be your hero, to save you even if it is from yourself.

Boys like him are going to love you even when he knows your love is an illusion because he believes that love can make anything real if he wills it and fights for it enough.

Girls like me know better. I’ve made my way out of labyrinths far more perilous and twisted than this one you have created.

Girls like me know that love alone, unrequited, untrue, holds no power over evil. It’s a difficult truth to accept, I know because it took thousands of scars for me to learn that you can’t save people from fires they light themselves.

But girls like me, girls who have risen above the raging seas and the never-ending darknesses know something greater.

When love stands tattered on its own, it will always be destroyed by the wicked, but when it stands hand in hand, unwavering in the face of adversity, love will always prevail.

***

This boy holds inside him a valiant heart. He is strong, so strong that he will always try to carry the weight of other’s skies on his shoulders though they may tremble beneath it.

He will make himself empty only so he can be filled with the demons that haunt the ones he loves, and he will risk his own sanity to keep others’ intact. He will burn to keep anyone out of darkness, and he will drown to fill beaten lungs with air.

He will take the stars from his eyes and place them so willingly into the ones of those who are lost.

He will give every piece of him to anyone who needs him, even if it means losing himself.

Girls like you allow him to do that. Girls like you take no matter the toll. Girls like you steal the life away from boys like him and call it love.

Girls like you are all smoke and no mirrors, and he lost his reflection somewhere in your haze.

Girls like you won’t let go because you can’t stand the idea of him standing on his own. His weakness is your power.

But boys like him grow up. Boys like him open their eyes and learn the patterns. Boys like him pick up those pieces you shattered and push onward.

Boys like him escape.

Boys like him rebuild themselves on their own, gently and completely. He doesn’t set fire to your memory or seal your door shut, instead, he leaves it open with the faith that one day you will have enough love inside of you to not have to steal it or leach it from others.

Boys like him walk away clean-handed, open-hearted, starry-eyed, and unstoppable.

Boys like him eventually find girls like me, and love like ours is something greater; quiet, unconditional, fearless, and true.