January 14, 2013 8:05pm Irony is putting your birth control pill in your mouth while scrolling on twitter to see the man that you’re in love with tweet “I’m so excited to meet my daughter.” Its not your child. Your heart drops to your toes and there’s this heavy lump in your throat. You’re not going to cry, you’re just having a moment.

To like his tumblr post, or favorite his tweet would seem sarcastic, bitter, and hurt. Not to say that I’m not any of the three, but I love children. And I love, I mean I loved, I mean I love him. I wanted him to know that I was excited for him in this moment. But it wouldn’t make sense. Not like that. I close all my apps put my phone face down. Let’s not indulge in masochism and read the same thing over and over, until I’m blue in the face.

The problem was, I too was excited for this baby to be born. Babies are the most perfect human beings on the planet, they come on this earth not asking to be born, but to be nurtured, loved, fed, and to be provided with all the essential nutrients to becoming a decent human being. No matter what circumstances they come from they’re still perfect and blameless. Now my feelings for this child’s parents, however, that’s a different story.

Its a weird situation to be in when the father of someone else’s child is in love with you and tells you things like, “We’re getting married.” or “Save that for our house.” With my face perplexed, every time he speaks of our impending future, my mind is filled with questions like “Are you joking?” or “Why won’t you stop selling me dreams?” Interestingly enough, however, I’ve never wanted him to tell me that. I didn’t need him to lie to me to get me to stay. I guess that worked on her, or other girls.

For some reason he thought he needed to make these promises of the future in order to secure me. To give me something to look forward to so I would stay. But I didn’t need that. I didn’t want that.

I wanted him to tell me it was going to be hard. I wanted to hear that life with his new child, the chaos of a newly scorned mother, and the chastising of his new relationship with me would be difficult. It would be hell. We would be miserable. It would be like climbing a moving mountain. Our relationship would feel like navigating through a hurricane on a tiny sailboat. She would make his life miserable because he fell in love with me while still sexing her. I’d resent him for forcing me to alter my future for his greediness. This perfect child would accuse me of wrecking her parents already wrecked home. But he would love and support me unconditionally, I would be his anchor, he would restore my faith that I wasn’t doing this in vain. We’d get through it. Together. I wanted to hear the truth.

The biggest difficulty in this relationship was getting the truth. It was like pulling teeth. I literally had to pull it out of him. He couldn’t lie to me. So he didn’t. In place of lying he stayed silent. Disappeared or deviated to what the future would be like to appease me. It hurt him to be honest about hurting me.

He was a coward.

Alexandra
pitched entry