Peter Pan - the boy who never grew up

I remember our first encounter - smudges of black ink that peeped from the sleeve of your shirt, the awkward patch of facial hair just below your lips, your endearing flatteries, the way your eyes shone when they met mine and somehow you convinced me we should exchange numbers and stay in touch --- something I rarely engage in with men I run into at the local night clubs where most of them just wanted my vagina and didn't care if I read the entire Harry Potter series more than twenty times and if I liked blueberry with my pancakes.

And so I categorized you into that little box of assumptions, even when you asked me out for a movie. Your friends wanted to watch MIB but I've already caught it so you caught Prometheus with me. You spoke to me everyday, checked if I had my meals, if I was home safe, and when I was sick, you left your workplace to buy me meds and deliver it to me at the bar.

You made me feel wanted, and for some inexplicable reason, I felt compelled to reciprocate these feelings. I didn't want to.

In terms of romantic relationships, I was a nomad. On a vagabond voyage, a hedonist on a quest of lust and liquor. I valued my freedom above all else, and being in love with a man who never loved me for most of the last year was crippling; I was fraught with guilt everytime I kissed another man, everytime I sexually fantasized about someone, despite us not being together. Just being in love with one man and craving another made me feel like I was cheating on an invisible lover. The man before this was a man I had loved desperately for three years, and had passed away on the eve of my birthday: the year I knew what it was for a soul to die, for your insides to crumble into ashes and the desire to end your existence. The pain that hurt so much, white hot, that it fried my nerves and I became numb.

I was afraid. Stable relationships were toxic to me, I thrived on chaos and carnal desires, because they were simple. Relationships are a complicated web of love and sex meshed together: so why not simplify it like a math equation by taking love out of the equation and just sex? It is a biological need after all, and the athiest in my justified fornication as a calling of the youthful flesh, a relevant scientific need unlike love.

But he began to care and it frightened me. We were beginning to meet up for barbeques, movie outings with his friends, bowling, it was a whirlwind of spending too much time together --- we discussed art, substances, liquor, cuddling, laughing, our favourite food, our family eccentricities; although exclusivity was not discussed, I could feel myself warming up to him. Of yet the feelings were not strong but they were beginning to stir within me, like a bear waking up from a long winter hibernation, awkward and drowsy at first, but it will soon hunger for nourishment and greed will come.

You knew I was hiding myself from you and you dug. You tried so hard to show me you were true and I wasn't just a casual fuck buddy or random chick, and you knew I wasn't easily convinced.
I could see the hurt in your eyes every time someone called me and asked where I was when I was sleeping over at yours and I would curtly inform them I was staying at a friend's. I could see the way your brows furrowed each time I repeated that word. No matter how testing I was and how I told you each and every time not to fall in love with me because I was a monster you stuck by.

Maybe it was the rush, the surge of hormones that comes with a new relationship, or the unfamiliarity of my skin that puts your heart beat into frenzies, or the oxycotin that birthed when your flesh presses together the emptiness of sexual intercourse.

Dear Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up - I am not your Wendy Darling. I'm the gypsy, the wild heart you cannot tame. The kind of heart that was been broken so many times that it was an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, one that could not love you wholly. I am the wanderer, the drifter, who believed change was the only constant and stability was a commodity I was willing to sacrifice just for the sweet taste of adrenaline and my other hedonistic quests.

Don't love me. Because I can't love you back. It's not because you are imperfect, or because I am imperfect. It's because I couldn't afford it. I'm sorry

(link to original artwork)