Love Ridden

When she arrives, I am a mess. A heaping pile of tears and snotty tissues is all I exist as now. She knows what to expect. She’s seen me like this before. But if I’m judging my state by the look on her face, I’d say I’ve never been this bad. Sitting down across from me, her legs crossed identical to mine, she puts her hands into my own and smiles sadly at me.

"Why do you do this to yourself?" She asks me for the thousandth time. I can hear the sadness in her voice, the pain she feels for me floating just under the surface of her words.

A watery laugh escapes and passes through my lips and I shrug. “I’m a glutton for punishment? I am a masochist? I am an idiot? Just pick your favorite…”

She shakes her head and sighs. “Love, you are none of those things. But you are a girl in love with a boy. One that has no idea, no idea of what waits for him inside of you. And if you ask me, he’s the idiot.”

My head rises. “Niall is not an idiot.”

The words are simple. They are words I believe with my whole heart. Words I would say again.
She smiles, a somewhat sad expression. “You would defend him forever, wouldn’t you? Even when your heart sits in a million different pieces and it’s his hand who did it, you still put yourself in front of the bullet. You still take the blame." Her voice begins to rise in frustration. "You can’t do this anymore. You have to make a decision. Right now. The way I see it you have three choices.”

I know what she is going to say even before she says it. We’ve talked through this so many times that it’s old news really. It’s last year's story, but somehow I’ve continued to keep it relevant. It is my daily headline
.
"You can either suck it up and keep living like this." She waves her hand over me, gesturing to the mess that I am, the mess that sits in front of her at this very moment.

"Or..." She pauses and looks at me seriously. "...you can tell him how you feel." She raises her eyebrows at me knowing full well that I haven’t decided if I can even say those words out loud to him.

"Or you can remove yourself from the situation."

My shoulders sink. I knew what I had to do. I knew what my only choice was really. If I wasn’t going to tell him how I felt, if I wasn’t going to admit that I couldn’t live without him, then I needed to try and live without him. It was the only way.

I can’t be his best friend anymore, his sounding board, his everything that his girlfriend doesn’t give him.

I can’t be the other woman, the secret affair, the affair that is our friendship.

So I have to let him go.

Notes