Love me slowly

Part 1

_The ocean when you look at it, is a vast body of water, the waves roll and crash on the shore. It is full of life. When you look at it from above, it is just a body of water. But when you look at it from below, you will witness a whole new world. It is huge, and it offers life to numerous things. The fish we eat originate from the sea; our voyagers and fishermen ride the waves night and day. The sea itself is a body- it beats with each drop of downpour; it thunders alongside the breaking of the earth; it misfires with the blast of volcanoes. It is a wondrous thing, and it is blue, the way I imagine my corpse to be when I finally die, when my soul decides it no longer wants to exist in this cruel world._

I don’t know what it was, that made me so happy when I was with him, it’s as if I could focus my pain on to someone else, fix him because I couldn’t fix myself. It’s because I wanted to be that person for him, the person that I wanted for myself, someone to fix me. I thought   that there was something wrong with me, something that doctors and psychologists should be able to fix. During the day when I was with my friends and my family, I felt like a normal girl whose only flaw was that she loved too hard. But when I was alone, my thoughts devoured and ate me up, leaving no meat on the bone, when I came up to speed with my feelings and emotions, it felt as if I was immortal and I was at the bottom of an alluring lake, the beautiful kind that families went to picnic by, where friends go to spend the day, basking under the sunlight but instead I was drowning every moment that I was there, I would die and then just as I was going to find peace I would be  revived and then drown and die all over again, this would happen over and over again, until I no longer had strength, not even to die and end my misery temporarily.
Nida and I were helping Ahad with his school work, we had our finals coming up, and we had a little study group. Initially Nida would study with us, but slowly she stopped coming and it was just Ahad and I. When I met him, I found him odd, he spoke so passionately about everything, the flamingos we had passed were not regular birds, to him they were the brightest fuchsia pink that he had ever seen, and he wanted me to see them as the most beautiful birds that my eyes could ever behold. He wanted me to feel the air that I was breathing to take note of every particle, every breath I was taking in. Everything about him was heightened, his anger, his love, his grief and every emotion he felt, he felt it in the most intense manner, as if it was the first time, he had ever experienced anything. I loved him for that. He told me I used the word love way too freely, that I gave my love away to just about anything that my kohl lined eyes could see.  
Ahad’s mother had left him, his older brother and father. He never told me why, and I never asked. He said that people have to want to be with you, they need to want to spend the rest of their lives with you, otherwise it’s pointless, if they don’t want to be with you with the same ferocity that the cosmos has when holding itself together, then what are you doing with them? There was a lot wrong with him, he was closer to the devil than the heavens, but I wanted him to consume me anyways, every part of me desired his touch, his speech, I craved him. At the time I didn’t know that what I needed to fuel me, to make me feel whole was not more of his darkness. I needed to better myself, to be the person I would look at in the mirror and feel at peace, I needed to be the lightness of air, the fresh spring type of air.

_“Why do you feel as if you don’t have friends?”_

When I started university, I once told him I felt lonely, that I feel as if I have no real friends. “Everyone’s not as friendly and approachable, and it was more difficult than I thought it would be. Everyone is moving so fast, there’s just so many people moving all the time.” So, he said,” Everyone likes something, you can tell what a person is into by the way they dress and talk and who they’re with and all the small details, you can just tell who radiates the same energy as you. Just be yourself and relatable, if you want to be around someone, you become a part of them through what you and them have in common.”
He was good at that, he was expendable and adaptable and good at changing his personality and expressions to see what goes with different people, that’s how he was, utterly and most ridiculously charming. For him, it’s not an effort, because he found knowledge in understanding people and sometimes, his words not mine, he would uncover a bit of gold which he could implement to make himself a better person, but most of the time he used what he learned to create opportunity and to grow. It was second nature to him, the way he lived his life. I asked him once, the answer left me very dissatisfied, what did he learn from me?
*_I know who you are as a person, I know what I need to know, what I want to know._*