Not Meant to Love

I fucking suck with relationships.

Since I moved out at 18, my dream has always been to get to a point where I can comfortably live close to my family–my “home”–again. Almost seven years later, and that dream of mine has finally come true. But now that I’m here, I just want to go somewhere else. Okay, I could’ve expressed that better. It’s not that I want to go somewhere else, it’s just that I can’t help the feeling that I don’t quite belong here.

(Does this happen to anyone else? Because it happens to me an awful lot. It’s legit like the story of my life. I always feel like I know what I want, but then it’s like once I get it… everything changes.)

And it’s nothing to do with my family; they’re perfect. Too perfect for me, really. This issue, is with me. I’m destructive. A natural occurring disaster. A black hole consuming everything and everyone around me like some starving cannibal.

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It’s like this sickness, this vile evil inside of me. It spreads like a cancer, eating all of my insides and leaving nothing but an emptiness. Like with many viruses, I often experience moments of remission where I’ll believe I’m cured. I’ll go days, weeks–but never months or years–completely asymptomatic. If I were, lets say, a cancer patient, this is the point where I’d flush all of my medications, climb the nearest mountaintop, and shout I’M CURED! 

But then, like a drug addicts relapse that forces him to see who he truly is, something happens that causes me to  It’s almost like waking from a pleasant dream into a horrific reality.

And leaving here–it isn’t what I want to do. Like I said, getting to a point where I can be closer to my family has been my dream for the past 7 years. But at least if I’m away from them, I won’t be able to hurt anyone else. Because hurting people, pushing away the ones who genuinely care for me… it’s just what I do. And no matter how much I try to fight it, it just happens. It’s who I am.

This is starting to sound like every emo teenager’s cliche, I admit, but here I am at 25 and still unable to correctly build and hold onto any one single relationship.

My family and I, we aren’t really alike, but we are very different. I mean that in the sense of I’m different from them. Sometimes the difference is painfully obvious, standing out like a speck of red on a blank white canvas. It can be something as little as the fact that I’m the only one who likes horror movies, or as in-your-face as our morals, principles, values, and overall emotions. I look at them and see light. I turn the gaze upon myself and the light goes out. It’s dark. (I suppose this is reminiscent of a previous post, When you feel like you don’t fit in with your Family)

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This is why I stay away from romance. Every so often I’ll lock eyes with a random cute girl while out at the grocery store or at a coffee shop, and I’ll kinda feel a spark of something inside as she smiles. Every guy reading this knows what I’m talking about. I’ll have a brief flash of a fantasy where I see myself talking to her, falling for her; I’ll imagine how perfect our first date might be, what her lips might taste like… Sometimes I’ll even meet girls on dating sites. We’ll go out on dates and just as I feel something, I’ll cut it off. Nowadays, where it says “Looking for…” on my dating site profiles, I check “Something casual.”

Why? Because I’ve felt that something before. Plenty of times. We all have. I’ve sat with the hope like a distant light that maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. This time I won’t fuck it up, this time I won’t fuck it up. I’ll hold onto that hope. I’ll hold onto that fragile little hope like I’m holding onto wind, even after I’ve watched the relationship nosedive into a mountainside and burst into a fiery explosion.

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And at some point, I have to accept: It’s me.

So nowadays, I stop it before it can begin. Instead of writing Once upon a time when I see that smile in the coffee shop, I write The end. I’d rather live in a fantasy of what could be then live in the tragedy of truth. I just, for whatever the reason may be, feel like I’m not made to love. Nor to be loved.

“I hide in plain sight, unable to reach out to people close to me, afraid I’ll hurt them. Like I’ve hurt so many others.”

-Dexter

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Thank you for reading,

-Jordan Antonacci

P.S. About the two hummingbirds I recently posted about. As much as I hate to even type it, one of them died today 😥 He was pretty injured from the fall from his nest and got really sick really fast. The other little guy on the other hand seems to be doing great. I’ve started feeding him this little mixture of meal worm insides (yum), sugar water, vitamins and what-not. I’m still not 100% sure the mama has been coming back, so I check on him often. He’s even started trying to fly!!!