dissonance

2 months of us disappeared. i'm not sure where. i'm not sure why. i need to stop reading into everything. or reading anything.
she sleeps with other girls' boyfriends and doesn't see the harm in it. she says she's doing their relationships a service, that she's helping the girls out by keeping their boyfriends happy. he'll come see her this weekend just to fuck her and she doesn't mind because she takes what she can get and i'm increasingly less surprised that she's been long without a boyfriend. not that it's significant, except that it seems to matter a remarkable lot to her.
there's little more depressing than the image of her, standing beside her clock radio, new joni in her ears, clenching her jaw and the side of the bureau, growing rigid against the swell of tears she didn't want her kids to witness beside the christmas tree as she realized it wasn't her, wrinkled and discarded, it wasn't her, the safe zone, taken for granted, who was getting the better parts of him. watching her grin and bear it for the sake of not upsetting the children killed me. absorbing her taut words, "no, you've made a fool out of me, my life," had me buckled in tears.
pregnancy is not for me what i thought it would be. i discounted too much. i need him too much and too weirdly and the impact on me is not good. i can't erase him over me in my bunk bed, where i'd fallen asleep at seven, heavy with taco grease and weed, wanting to kiss me, fuck me, only to send me lurching into the safety bucket stowed beneath my bed. and he, like him, sat sighing on the end of my bed, watching my blotchy cheeks and teary eyes, trying to avoid staring at the strings of sticky puke hanging from my mouth. it wasn't long before he didn't bother me at night anymore, before he had found a more palatable replacement, someone who wouldn't barf when he kissed her, someone whose body wasn't covered in zebra pelt, someone on whose thin frame his jeans would be saggy, someone who didn't look like hell and feel like hell and cry like hell every time she stopped to think.
possibly it is too much to expect of him not to go that route. the weak and wounded part of me tinkers with preemptive protection and the realization that i remember every single day while for him it's much more hazy. maybe now is not a good time for us to be sharing,. as much as i want to think it can only help us grow. maybe now i am too needy, too fragile. maybe we are not equipped to go there. many people who have been together, committed, for dozens of years awake to find they're not. when did my expectations become so absurd? when did i lose my valuably defensive compartmentalizing ability? i feel stark naked on a hilltop bathed in artificial light, a thousand magnifying lenses on every inch of me, shutters prepared to blink. and i'm not roaring, the way he said, standing nude with his eyes squeezed shut before me, he hoped i would.
she keeps telling me how their two lives will become one. i don't believe that can happen. i don't believe in utter union. because i don't think anyone could ever be that honest, that exposed. and people should not too readily relinquish themselves and every dirty little secret they've ever kept tightly sealed in their closets for the sake of forming a deeper bond. i don't know what will give us a deeper bond, an ignorance that has me scrambling rawly in the dark after he's quickly rolled from me to fall fast into a steady snore. probably not total immersive intertwining.
i am too much, this is too much right now. i don't know how to steer her from the bottomless pit that i tripped into long before i was her age. i don't know how to steer him from the bottomless pit that is me. i don't know how to steer myself from the bottomless pit that is trying to piece together the fragments of his words.