this is me over you.

The worst day of this season was the day I wore a shirt you once took off me. We weren't talking much, and I was worried about you fucking someone else because to me, there was you and only you, and that's the way I liked it. I was pulled from class because the person who lives on the other side of my bedroom wall didn't want to be a part of the world anymore, and the one across the hall needed my help because after I betrayed one's trust, I gained another's. I sat in the waiting room, fidgeting with my shirt – something you, my pseudo psychoanalyist, would definitely call a nervous habit. This time I'd say you were right, but it wasn't habitual, it was because I was out of my mind worried that all the pill's poison was going to destroy her. It was October and it was way too hot outside. Even though I was wearing a skirt, my thighs were sweaty and the air-conditioning was making every exposed piece of flesh crawl and the nerves in my nose itch. I noticed that because of you and your lust, only three of the seven buttons were left, and I was never motivated enough to replace them. Or maybe I just liked the steady reminder that you used to want me in that way. The first night we kissed was the night I decided it was light enough to wear in a smoke-infested room of drunken strangers. (You weren't quite a stranger. Your roommate and I got into some heated debates with people who saw nothing wrong with the senseless war in Iraq.) Self-conscious about my undergarments showing through the sheer poly-cotton blend, I wore a vest over it with black pattern on the back you said reminder you of a spider web. You'd eventually rip that, too.

I started lusting about you in the waiting room while a lanky administrative assistant with blue scrubs and red-rimmed glasses kept looking at me through his room's window. I thought about you how had a habit of ruining my belongings. Two weeks after you took off my shirt, you did it again. It was Hitler's birthday, and all the kids I knew from Indiana and Johnstown were smoking pot in an apartment on Sixth Street while you and me were having sex for the first time together in the bedroom that a gay boy with your name now lives in. With first-time jitters, you ripped a placket off my shirt, laughed and slammed your tongue down my throat when I called you out on it. Two months later when I moved back to Indiana, you pulled so hard on my dress that you jammed the zipper. (It has yet to be fixed, and my mother bought me that dress for my 21st birthday, thank you.) You've pulled buttons, jammed zippers, torn panties and have never apologized. Meaningless material possessions aside, you've done worse. You've broken my heart, torn my self-confidence and fueled me with a bout of anxiety, you self-absorbed, narcissistic prick.

But that was in early October. It's now mid-November. At first the only things that held me back from this was thinking of the way you screamed my name in the dark after jumping off Allen Bridge. Or the way you took care of me that time I was puking on the side of your dad's Jeep after consuming far too much pizza and PBR. Even thinking about al the mornings you fueled me caffeine and conversation was enough for me to hold on. I've heard a dozen apologies, but none of them really changed the fact that you did what you did when you did it. Just because he was guy, doesn't mean it didn't hurt me. I don't answer your late-night texts until the next day and I take time to call you back. I guess I finally know better.