If I Were To Tell You The Goddamn Truth
By: Anonymous
I guess I'm really not a nice sweet girl. I have prey and I stalk them out, I know exactly how to get under someone’s skin, I know how to make them crazy. How angry I used to get at he who shall not be named for doing this. It’s because he gave me a taste of my own medicine.
Men. I promise them the world on a platter. I can at once make them feel so happy, happier than they've ever been. I can make them see a future with me, filled with laughter and children and delicious foods, adventure, love....and I pull the rug out from under them every time. I haven't gotten into anything serious lately. I didn't want to keep doing it to people. I could have gotten somewhere with guy x. I could have put in the effort and tried to love him. I didn't bother. From our second date, I knew how it would end. He'd love me and want me and all I'd be able to see was his small income and easy-to-take-advantage of personality and I'd just fillet him in the end. I know now that he's sad, but he should count himself lucky that I didn't try to get back in touch with him. My father told me when I was a girl that they'd be lining up down the block to date me - I didn't know how true his words would be and how terrifying my own power. I've broken at least 6 hearts. I've let people down; I've made grown men cry. It’s at once aged me and humbled me. It's given me a buoyancy of control that I never wanted. It scares me and hurts me but I don't know how to stop. I don't know how to be good again, to want the good boy, to be able to be honest with him. At times I am beyond love. I feel like a jaded truth teller: there is no love. Only, maybe, compatibility and the luck of circumstance. So many people, all chasing what they’ve been told is love. Or they’re chasing passion, the phantom cousin of love that fades away so quickly, you wonder how it is you've spent your whole life wanting it.
It could be my own problem of wanting the challenge. When I know a man wants, and says it- I lose my sense of honor. As though I weren't meant to be wasted on someone who isn’t going to challenge me - but I know how childish that is. You think I don’t know how silly, how stupid that sounds? Shouldn't I just want a good man, who will provide for me and make me happy? Who will give me children and a home? Not someone like he who shall not be named, who for god sakes became a truck driver. But sometimes your heart speaks to you in ways you wished it wouldn't. You wish it could just catch up to the logical conclusions of your brain. Alas, it doesn't and almost two years later I'm still dreaming about the boy who took hold of me, who possessed me and tore me apart. The only man I had never lied to, who I was completely and totally myself with. With hindsight I pretend it was a madness that took hold of me, it was my naiveté at what he could do to me. Bullshit.
Hadn’t I had enough experience to know what the “proper thing” was? Was I possessed? I knew the danger. I didn't care what he wanted from me, I couldn’t even ask. I didn't care that he was offering me nothing. I just knew that I had to be with him and my sick heart was after him for so long that I couldn't see past it. True passion never dies it just finds a way to tuck itself under the covers, it finds its way to smolder within you, always aching and pulling at you in a little way that you can just barely live with.
So no, I’m not really nice and I’m not really sweet. I think it is human to be passionate, to be wrong, to do things that are rebellious. We must all have one or two stories in our lives where we felt real and true passion. Fire in the blood - as French author Irene Nermirovsky has put it. In her famous novel of that title, Honrey, a lonely old man, gets angry at Helene - the woman whose virginity he took - when she pretends in her middle age to not remember, to not even think, to not even consider who she used to be when she had had that one moment of secretive passion in her entire life.
Now she is a respectable married woman, passion long ago forgotten. He poses the question - who knows the real woman, the lover or the husband? I laughed out right when I read that sentence - because no one knows the real woman. Open me up and you will see, I’m a gallery of broken hearts. The real woman? She doesn't exist for anyone. She only exists within herself. It's when she wakes up each morning and looks in the mirror, really looks and knows that she will have to spend one more entire day, smiling, faking, pretending to be amused, pretending to be a charming girl. But within her lies despair, hanging like a wrung out, damp towel. For to be a woman means you must want security, must want a respectable reputation, must want a good man and a good family - but it may come at the expense of your life’s true passion, if it even exists.
As much as the modern world would like to have us forget, we do have ticking time bombs attached to our uterus’s and do not have the luxury of spending an eternity waiting for love. Men do not have this dilemma. Men can romp the world free of worry or a need for stability for at least a lifetime until they decide they want to settle down. And by then they may have tasted all the passion the world had to offer. But women. Ah, women. We can’t lest we get branded, lest we desire ridicule upon ourselves. Lest we forget that our family’s reputations are at stake. So go ahead and marry the lawyer, the doctor, the graying and boring accountant. The men of passion, the romping men, the free men - they’ll never give you the stability the world says you need. But the poor accountant. He’ll never make you sweat.
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