Within Temptation (A Short Story)

Sahara Band_The Chord 

“The girls tell me that I’m irresistible” he used to tell me that and I used to make fun of him and tease him about it. Deep inside of me I’ve always known that he was right; he was irresistible to me; I loved everything about him. I loved his wretchedness and my feelings toward him as a puzzle that needed solving. I’ve always liked riddles and he was the biggest riddle I’ve ever come across. In his clarity I read entanglement, in his smile I read pain and mystery and in his kindness I read monstrosity. He is the most uncertain certainty that anyone can meet; he is the one I want.

I’ve been suppressing my emotions toward him for five years now. I meet him five years ago and I’ve always felt something towards him, an unidentified emotion that I can’t call love neither can I call it a crush. It is something in between both; an uncertain truth just like he is.  I cared for him as a friend and I treated him as one, he did exactly the same with me. He cared for me and loved as a little sister.

At the beginning I used to tell myself that it’s only something normal, I’m still eighteen and he is cute and masculine, it’s normal to feel such feelings toward him as I’m a teenager still. I kept suppressing my feelings and kept redirecting it towards anything else but him. It worked for me just fine and helped me sustain my relation with him on the border of friendship for almost four years.

I really came to know him in the third year, we were studying together, myself, him and a couple of our friends as well. We were a group of five and I was the only girl amongst them. In the first year we knew each other I was just the invisible girl, as usual. I was only known for my temper and my annoyingly loud voice. I had “DANGEROUS, Don’t approach or you’d suffer a tragic death of electrocution” written all over me. I was described as an erupting volcano that never sleeps and a couple of things more. AN ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION, I was. I was the reckless, messy girl who cares about nothing and going her own way, setting her mind on whatever made no sense whatsoever. I liked that about me; I was building my own fortress and hiding inside of it. I was hiding from temptations; my own temptations, his temptations, the temptation of the world; I was hiding from myself within myself. It is like when you’ve ran out of places to resort to so you resort to yourself knowing that it’s yourself from whom you’re running.

The first moment I realized my growing affection towards him was when I watched him sleep. He had an angelic face that I can never forget and a load of pain that I can never ignore. Accompanying that was a smile that torn me to pieces along with my own distorted self. Watching him sleep was igniting; he awakened the sleeping giant within me, causing my volcano to burst out with an enormous speed, maybe even equal to that of light. The burn inside of my heart was so painful that it kept me from breathing and rushed chocking tears, so salty, to my eyes. I felt that it was an invitation not uttered to come into his world, the one he kept from others, or maybe that’s what I told myself. We talked, I talked with him as freely and openly as I’ve never talked with a man before. He gave me the opportunity to come into his mentality and just when I thought I solved his riddle I discovered that I was taking his riddle into me, I was becoming the riddle I wanted to solve. That’s what made me love him even more than I could have ever perceived.

He told me his secrets and I opened up for him about mine. He knew the things that I would kill to keep from others, men and women. I just talked as if talking to myself and he didn’t mind. He loved seeing this part of me, or so I think. He was my person, and he is still. In him, I saw my lost self. I saw the man that reflected my insanity, indifference, sexuality and monstrosity. I kept suppressing it all and called him an “Affair”. He was, and still is, one of those who you fantasize about yet you know that he can never be yours because he can’t; being together is just against the cosmic order, an un-heavenly union of two broken yet fighting souls. Rebels against ourselves we both were.

It all inevitably exploded, showing itself to my acknowledgment, in the manner of “You ignore me, you die” that I was falling for him. I was falling for everything about him. It was clear for him as well; an approaching that was never meant to be. I am the kind of the person who can never hold back his guts. I hinted it out that I was into him and he knew that I knew that he knew about my feelings but he waited for me to expose them myself. He waited for the words to come out of my mouth and expose themselves so that he can tell me “we can’t be together because I’m not good enough for you…it’s not you, it’s me” I knew that this would come someday. I was just postponing the bombing of my own fortress by the mines I myself implanted in its vicinity; it was a self-destruction.

Just as he waited for me to say what he already knew, I too waited to listen to the words that I knew he’d say. It was like I wanted to hear him say it so that I can eradicate my undetermined emotions toward him so that we both can move on. I was holding him back unintentionally and he was holding me back in the same manner. We both needed to let it out so that we can get free of each other’s ghosts. My ghost haunted his dreams and mine, while his did the same. I saw in him my lust and he saw in me a love that is doomed to end tragically if it was given the chance to exist. We ended it before it can start, it was the wise thing to do, we both thought.

Knowing what we both knew about each other made us close even more, never ignoring one another. He was trying to keep me from getting hurt and I was trying to sustain our relationship so as not to lose each other. It wasn’t the first case in which a girl told him that she loved him, after all he was irresistible. He dealt with it well and that made me love him even more. I did what I did best, I rebuilt my fortress, convincing myself that it’ll end, and it seemed like it did after a couple of months. We both did what we thought was best for each other. We both knew that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place and it was the thing that we both never saw coming.

Just as I came clean about my feelings toward him, I came clean about “overcoming my crush on him”. I told him that I was over him as a lover and that I wanted to keep him as close as a friend can ever be. We both loved the idea that it is all going back to normal as if it has never happened. It was compelling, if I may say. I was numb towards him for a couple of months after that. Somehow I just stopped feeling anything toward him. This made me glad as well as it made him. Yet, whenever I hear badly of him I take his pain into me; feeling the same pain that he might be experiencing. I fantasized about him. I did that with whatever meaning this word might carry. I have no other expression to use instead of that one and I don’t think that any other would convey what I am feeling now.

Our first encounter in months finally came. It’s been a very long time for me. I was unable to reach him as both our phones got broken and my internet connection went down. During this period there was nothing else on my mind but him; I was thinking about him by day and was dreaming of him at night. I’ve missed him so much that I would run to him, take him in my arms and clasp to him so tight and kiss him on his cheeks so as to forget how much I’ve missed him during this "long time, no see".  He was standing in front of me but I did nothing of what I wanted to do. The words were on the tip of my tongue and then I just reacted as if a cat has eaten it; my useless, coward guts.

That was when I realized that I was never over him and it was just another phase of self-destruction that I was leading myself to. It was something that he didn’t know about this time. A kind of torment that would shatter me as I’m trying to stay away from him. It’s all collapsing because it was all built on an imaginary foundation of strength that I thought I possessed. I was just as fake as my fortress was, I am the fortress that I built; I’m the temptation within the temptation he held.

As I’m writing this, I know that it might drive me to lose you, something that I hope would not happen for you are too valuable and too important to me that can’t be lost. I know it yet I’m writing it all because if I didn’t write it I would burst into flames burning myself and burning you with me. I hope that if you read this not to lose your trust in me or to kill our friendship. I wouldn’t take it and I wouldn’t be able to live with it. Just as tempting as your love was to me, writing about it was tempting too. I just wanted to tell the story the way I saw it and I wanted to give these papers the courage that I lacked in expressing everything that I have been feeling since we first met. Now I’m giving these words the power to speak my unspoken mind; to speak of the words that I opened my mouth to speak off today but I just couldn’t get out. Please forgive me for following my temptation and for falling in your love.