I don’t sleep in his arms that night, I feel trapped even after our discussion and how he had seen me flushed and I had more than many reasons to do so, to be entirely opened and blossomed. I keep tossing and turning with no understanding of the fear, but just some sense of overwhelmness and still stiff from the conversation and it blurs out in my mind so much, that I can barely remember it. He came in to check how I was, just to see me with my hair forming a halo on the wall, not raising an eyebrow but concern and it so happens that sometimes a touch requires two people and he was one of them. I didn’t dare to look down or even properly at him, still standing and wondering if that would’ve changed anything at all. Would we have still divorced then? Would I still feel lonely in a trapped marriage?
But what traps did I even have, when we both decided to keep the question of children open and just kept going with our lives and I had quit my job to paint and he had supported me in the end. Just like he was now.
So the question is why can’t I love? Why can’t I just forget and love with nothing at all to be afraid of?
Why had the same happened with Lana?
After him barely getting anything out of me just with body language and our own tension getting the worst of us, we walked outside just to have the cold greet us and he had handed me his jacket. It felt to see every moment under the frost of the grass and just like having a crush, you ask yourself what would you do if it all became true?
And you never seem to speak again and suddenly it becomes an unpleasant accident to even do so, in the mind. Have we all lost our minds to even imagine the people we love in our heads? How come are all of our lullabies so insane, when we had started off with stories and now we end up with pure frustration.
Jamie tries to stomach to speak up, but I’m enjoying the cold, that no matter how much you can layer up in favourite sweaters and we would still always have a smoke and even as I was signing the divorce papers I knew what I would miss and where the world would split. And how come I was never a free spirit again and why would I mourn my husband.
As we stood there smoking, he ended up getting a text notification, which I only briefly saw as someone called Jack. I grinned, feeling as if we were old friends again. I always wanted to be friends with him and I even dreaded the day I had fallen in love with him, allowing all the posters to fall on my face the next morning and I was all curled up in lost past lovers, knowing that my life after tasting the apple of love wouldn’t be the same. Then I thought that my sisterly love with Lana was just something else, that it wasn’t love and just like anyone else I just thought we were messing with too many lines, streamers, fireworks and Christmases.
“Who’s Jack?” Jamie just paled lightly, which was enough for me to ask again, as if we were alone and much younger again and we hadn’t wasted so many years together being lovers. I missed him, but an ex spouse never says that unless they want troubles and trying the same burnt crepes in the morning again. “Is he your boyfriend, Jamie?”
He just shook his head, rubbing his eye from sleep and I watched his pajama pants catching up with the wind.
“No, he’s just a bloke from work. We text occasionally, somehow. He mourns about his girlfriends... But he’s too clingy to me, so we’ll see.” He widens his eyes, quickly replying before explaining. “Both me and him text each other if we can’t sleep-”
“No guts to call, then?” I ask as he holds his cigarette between his teeth.
“Nope.” And maybe it’s all in my head and he doesn’t want me anymore.
And why is it that we always remember the end to divorce again but never the begining with all the love we’ve had? I don’t even know how come he’s still listening to me as he puts the cigarette away and I just keep staring at him and we excuse each other, because nothing had changed, I just had found myself really. But I did wish that my story had been more ambiguous than gendered, but when it comes to such, the past is instantly scrapped and explained as if a murder case.
Why can’t we romanticize the day as much as we do the night?
A funeral becomes a family reunion and a family reunion is when everyone decides to call everyone who isn’t working a gold digger and me and Lana ended up as those. Because being pretty in marriage or selling art doesn’t seem to sell well when you need to discuss anything. It had been next morning then and with the lack of sleep both me and Lana just stood near the wall, as if we were young again, together as I would watch Jamie mingle and check his phone from while to while and I guess that’s when I wound change feet that my sister noticed.
“He’s banging someone already?” She sniffs, looking ahead, nodding as if confirming her own words without my reply. “Well, that’s far faster than you.”
Lana pauses and we look at each other.
“Not as fast as me, though.”
I would laugh with her or at her, but instead I’ve known of all of her heartbreak and how she had gone through with all the bones of ours I hadn’t known properly. I never apologized and I wanted to end up being the only one at the cemetary never to realize why had it been so that I would always bury all the memories scattered around me, as if they were the halo I had never wanted upon my neck to hang me like a rope.
I don’t reply and instead I excuse myself with the drink, not knowing how to even hold in a social setting and thinking of Jamie pinning me down and I feel angry all of a sudden, that Lana didn’t follow me, that Jamie never told me that I had never been a woman, allowing me now to free fall with my own confusion about gender and acceptance that I had never known myself.
When there is something that a partner doesn’t say, you start wondering if there is something else they are hiding and what lies do they even hang up on the cloak along next to the doorway?
And I had been burying Lana, with my face all in dirt and fingers sticking with no plot twist in mind, all had been bleak and understanding like a long soul screech because I had killed my own sister by just leaving her behind for another man. And if you would ask me at gunpoint why had I done that, I would say that it had been the same thing with Jamie, I had never wanted to love anyone, because when you grow up and you get told that no one will ever love you, it gets to you and that’s when I started thinking maybe I should be the one not loving back before someone else gets to me.
That’s why single nights are a bit fuller than a bottle filled with liquid, glittering.
I don’t notice myself dreaming against the stairs, holding the drink between my knees, wondering why were they even serving beer. Lana had gone already and I couldn’t blame her at all, as I had started dreaming of Jamie throwing dishes all over the place and Lana breaking plates both of them yelling at the sudden noise and I wondered how come I could even love two people at the same time. I had then dreamt that I had gotten lost in the supermarket only to find some kid mock kung-fu fighting in the aisles.
Everyone was moving in life, not just in the dream and I was the one standing with forgotten feelings. And I wasn’t even jealous of Lana’s marriage as much as I was furious and jealous of Jamie’s latest partner.
Maybe I should’ve figured something when he had told me about past lovers and how I had been the second girlfriend he’d ever had, but that never told me anything because we are no one in other people’s words, were what they had fallen in love with, not ourselves.
I was used to Lana and I could convince myself that we had twirled in a different life, while when it came to Jamie it was still fresh blood and I had never buried him, I hadn’t walked away with someone else from the graveyard, instead I had been left there all alone and I had been mad at the lawyer for everything he had ever told me and how he could talk to all of my relatives as if he still had the ring on.
When I was growing up I would imagine all of exes sitting on chairs around me, well he was still behind me rather than sitting, holding me close because
everything. And he was stroking my face. My eyes closed.
-
I think I tried like finishing the chapter like 3 times xD and I was really sad and anxious as I was writing it, so that seeped through and I kind of started touching on emotional abuse which I'm constantly getting reminded of these days, so I kind of chucked that in.
Also before I go on analysis bit by bit, I started touching on the whole Alison leaving Lana for Jamie bit, but I wanted it as an ending but once I get an idea unless it's To Miles, I can't hold it in my head until it's supposed to show up xD I'll go back on it in a bit xD
RV has actually got to be my fave stories to constabntly keep writing and also to think about, since I've got my fave or one of my fave love triangles here and this is my constant medicine for ending Poison the Rose, as I get to discuss more things in depth and play with different scenes like the ending of Alison holding a dead Lana and vice versa is seen in a different light here with Alison burying Lana. So in a way it's a sort of AU/spin-off/not related at all story to PTR.
The beginning of this chapter kind of has all the questions up in the air, while the end just answers the abuse and why Alison ended up leaving two lovers behind for her own solitude. And I know I quote it a lot, but it is something which had been said to me and fucks me up along with that your partner will lie just to keep face. I've heard enough.
I've written this such a good while ago that I actually go like... wait, I thought this was posted xD like the Alison and Jamie scene. I've also been listening to Echo Home on repeat as I'm writing the backstory and story itself, so I guess that explains the sudden Jamie turns. The song is absolutely gorgeous and is the one which stands out the most to me and I'm looking forward to the studio version so so so much.
I love the cold, so that explains why I like in Sweden, at least the weather aspect of it, but I am sad that we're not getting any warmish weather, it's a bit odd and unusual I guess for me xD but I do wish we had it a bit warmer to be honest :)
I should've done Grindr xD
I see that Jamie is more of a calling person, but hell, for this story I needed texts, so here they are xD
I'm a night person, but sometimes I try out of the best to be a day person, but fuck, you just can't be as creative and I just can even be bored in the day while in the night I just feel like doing everything at once xD
I had the image of Alison being angry at Jamie, so I had used that really.
Alison's words are rather harsh about partners but some of them are my own paranoia as well.
I saw a kid today while I was grocery shopping actually doing that and I just wrote it down to make sure and I had dreamt of Callie breaking plates so I had taken that into the dream sequence here as well.
The chairs is something I would imagine growing up and my first ex had always been behind me until I had met Callie so yeah.
Callie pointed out many things as she read it, I kind of wrote naturally like Alison being a sad drunk and how the recent break-up hurts more.
I kind of felt in angsty sort of need to write about longtime crush mood, so that had been a bit inspiration for Jamie even if the Alison/Jamie loveline has a stronger obviously past and I'm babbling. That's why I had thought so much of the scenes between Alison and Jamie in this story, anyway xD
I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please tell me
Thank you
<3
Jamie
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