The silence in the air was so heavy that she felt like she was slowly suffocating.
His eyes seemed to see deeper into her soul than even she could see. She couldn't meet his gaze because she knew exactly what would happen if she did. It would be the end of her; the end of all the walls she had spent so much time building inside, the end of her promise to never fall in love again, the end of the version of herself that she had come to believe was the only version she would ever be.
She looked down at her hands, which were entwined in each other as they rested on her lap. Small dots of blood were starting to emerge from under the skin of her cuticles. She had a nasty habit of picking at her cuticles when she was nervous or bored. She had been doing it ever since she was a little girl. She started sucking at her thumb to stop the bleeding, all the while avoiding his electric gaze.
"i know why you're always angry with me."
She wasn't sure if the sound of his voice was a welcome relief from the oppressive silence, or not.
"Oh really?"
She pulled her thumb out of her mouth and inspected it. It wasn't really bleeding anymore. It was just sort of red and tender. She clasped her hands back together and leaned back against the wall.
"You're so used to being independent that you're afraid having someone in your life will take all of that away. You're afraid that letting yourself have feelings for someone will make you needy and dependent, so every time things start to get good between us, you find something to fight with me about so that you have a reason to push me away. But trust me, you're not like that. I know you - a lot better than you think I do - and you're not that kind of person."
She noticed that her thumb was starting to bleed again. She pressed her thumb against her lips to keep pressure on the bleeding. This is stupid, she thought. I have half a mind to tell him to leave.
But the more she thought about it, the more his words made sense... and the more she hated him for being right. Is it possible to be so afraid of feeling insecure, that that fear itself becomes an insecurity?
She didn't speak for several minutes. A million different thoughts ran through her mind during that time, most of them just bits and pieces of ideas that didn't even make sense. He sat there patiently and waited for her to respond, his eyes roving her face as if he could actually see the thought process going on in her head.
"I'm just afraid because I don't know what I mean to you." The words came out before she could even stop herself.
He lifted his eyebrows in surprise, but didn't respond. Several moments passed where neither of them spoke. Eventually, the silence became too much for her.
"My mind is constantly running. I don't know if it's my anxiety or undiagnosed ADD or whatever, but my mind is like a beehive that someone's thrown a rock at; raging chaos. It's like that every day from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. My mind doesn't have an off-switch. It's just always on, and nothing I've tried really stops it. Sometimes I wish I could just rip my brain out so that I could finally get some peace and quiet. A lot of the thoughts that run through my mind aren't even productive thoughts. Most of them are just bits and pieces of things that aren't even fully developed, possible scenarios that my anxiety makes up, or worries that aren't even real." She paused to take a breath and exhaled. "But when I'm with you, I don't think about anything else. When I'm with you, I'm just happy."
As soon as she finished speaking, he pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, as if he was afraid she would disappear if he didn't. She wrapped her arms around his body, feeling it tremble as he sniffled.
He rubbed little circles into the small of her back and she grabbed a handful of his shirt. Mascara-stained tears rolled down her cheeks and onto the sleeve of his white cotton tee shirt. They stayed like that for some time, holding onto each other like two scared little children.
When they pulled away, she looked into his eyes. Behind the tears, she saw parts of him that she had never seen before; the pain and the scars, the shame and the guilt. She saw all of the darkest parts of him, and as he looked back at her, he saw all of the darkest parts of her too.
For a long time, she had been wary of showing people how much darkness she truly harbored within herself. She had always assumed that nobody would care or that nobody would want to hear about it, so she had hidden it away.
For as long as he could remember, he had been afraid of revealing how much darkness he carried within himself. He had always assumed that people would judge him for what he had been through - judge him without knowing who he really was - so he had hidden it away.
But for the first time in both of their lives, neither of them were afraid of what the other would see, as their eyes searched each other's souls deeper than anybody ever had.
See, the hardest part of fighting a war that nobody understands is that you have to walk alone. But sometimes, when you least expect it, you'll find someone who won't let you.
