Alone [manxman]

eleven:: when there are no more secrets.

YOU ARE HERE:: JHENÉ AIKO //WAKE UP ALONE::AMY WINEHOUSE

ELEVEN: When there are no more secrets.

                 Trying not to touch him was easier than I thought, especially when we had so much to talk about. Silences weren't so awkward with him. It was a bit weird, the way we shifted so quickly back from complete nothing... to something so intimate.

                 He and Ben got a place together somewhere near college town, a bit closer to Brighton than I'd have liked if we were being honest. I thought I'd have a bit more time to get my shit together before he arrived, at least... Now, I was spending weeknights in his arms.

                Even if I wasn't a big fan of re-living what Brighton had to offer, still, it gave me him.

                The novelty of art school wore off pretty quickly when grants and savings only really covered the first two years. Looking back, following him to California felt like an alternate reality that could've saved me so much heartache.

                 I ran, it was one of my worst personality traits, therapy told me that... My dad did as well, that flighty nature must have come from him. Milo wasn't my mom's... he was baggage from a broken marriage, I didn't learn that until I'd moved out and maybe that was why my mother didn't intervene much.

                 My father was a runner, literally, he ran track in high school... he ran from his last marriage, to a new city. He fell in love with my mother on a business trip in Puerto Morelos, Milo was 4, they started a new family. I didn't realize how much I was actually like my father until then.

                  Maybe running in this situation was staying put and committing to long distance when I knew we were much too fragile. Suddenly, I had the biggest urge to have a bachelor's degree in fine art.

                 Running was what I was good at, my exes told me that enough times. I'd seen enough of the insides of European nightclubs and graffitied bathroom stalls to prove that... regretful and soaked in liquor, I'd been with enough boys for a lifetime.

                 But Jules was different. The fear that he'd see everything there was to see about me, that he'd truly know me... it was paralyzing, really. I had ugly sides, dirty, disgusting sides. I had ugly years and I was so prone to fucking everything up. I think these traits really shone in me when things felt too heavy.

                Following him could've been so tragic.

                I could've been myself and it would've been too much; it could've felt like marriage.

               Julian wasn't very in love with the idea of young marriage. It, likely, stemmed from his parents and midnight conversations confirmed that something that gave us such comfort the year before... the promise of being together, it felt like marriage.

                I worried that the persistence of his -and I quote- 'suffocation' by my affection when he was off his meds, it said more than he wanted to. Maybe the way he felt cornered by my desire to fix him was only because we were constantly on top of each other for years.

                Our last year wasn't happy.

Maybe I blamed him for that a little, I could tell he blamed himself but I didn't wanna regret getting back on that plane. I didn't wanna regret anything about us, and I had no desire to.

                 He'd hit the point in his life where he was free from small-town Brighton, Michigan. Julian could live without the constant memories of bigotry and...