Bad at Love by Karina Halle
I suck in a deep breath, trying not to shake. “Laz, every couple has their ups and downs, every relationship gets hard. It’s work. It gets scary sometimes but you just power through it.” I try to sound strong and brave and confident, like I can convince him if I try hard enough. “Jane…Jane said sometimes you just need someone else as complicated and fucked up as you are to make love work. And that’s what we are, Laz. We are fucked up and complicated and we’re equals.”
“No, we aren’t,” he says, voice gruff. “You’re wrong, Marina. I’m fucked up. I’m complicated. And I’m completely undeserving of your love. I am not your equal. You are beautiful,” he trails off, pinching his eyes shut, looking away and I can hear his pain, feel his pain, but it’s still eclipsed by my own. “You’re beautiful and you’re smart and you’re so good and so pure and so giving and you need someone who is your equal, who can give what you give. That someone isn’t me.”
Everything hurts, everything. I can’t let this be the end, I can’t let him do this.
“Don’t do this,” I warn him, my voice quivering. “Don’t you dare do this. Don’t do this with me. Okay? You don’t get to decide if I’m deserving or not. You just don’t.”
“But I am deciding it,” he says. “This can’t work.”
“It does work!” I snap at him, trying so hard to keep the waterworks at bay, to not break down, to not lose my mind, to not go crazy. “It is working. This is just your insecurities. This is what you always do and it’s a habit and you’re not going to do this, not today. We are going to work together because I love you and that’s what happens when couples in love fight. They work it through. They talk. They don’t run. They don’t bail when it gets hard. They don’t give up. Okay, you aren’t giving up on us.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. “I don’t have a choice.”
He turns around, head low, his back to me.
I’m speechless, dumbfounded.
How dare he?
How dare he turn his back on me, on this?
To not even want to fight…
“It can work if you just put in the effort for once,” I tell him, my breath shallow now, like I’m losing air, drowning, a slow leak. “It can work if you want it to.”
“Maybe I don’t want it to. Maybe I don’t love you. I don’t love you like you love me.”
Oh.
I…
The world begins to spin.
I am dead on my feet.
“You…” I start to say but I can’t go on. I can’t, my heart is breaking, sharp shards that obliterate the rest of my body. I’m empty and cold and hollow in seconds. Drained.
“I’m sorry,” he says, sniffing. I still can’t see his face. It’s better that way. “I love you as a friend. But I know that’s not what you want from me right now.”
“A friend?” I manage to say. “You love me as…a friend? Just a friend? After we’ve been fucking each other for a month, you love me still as a friend? That’s all I am to you?” My voice is getting higher, shriller, with each note. “You’re a liar!”
He glances at me with bloodshot eyes, swallowing hard, and shakes his head. “No. Marina, please. Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Don’t make me hurt you?” I yell, grabbing the sides of my head as if that will contain the rage, the hurt. “You’re telling me you don’t love me! You’re…you’re breaking up with me. Right? Right, this is what this is, you dumping yet another girlfriend of yours because that’s what you fucking do, you fucking coward!”
“Hey,” he snaps at me, eyes wild. “This hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
“Oh my god! Oh my god, did you seriously just say that to me? How fucking dare you? This hurts you Laz? Then don’t do it!”
“I don’t have a choice. I don’t fucking love you!”
Dying.
I am dead on my feet, dying inside.
His words have acted like a knife, straight to my heart, and now the serrated edges are slicing down, ripping and tearing and shredding everything good inside me.
The pain is…
indescribable.
I want to fall to my knees, curl up into a ball and shove something deep inside my chest, reach into the cave it’s become, wrap a tourniquet around the wound until I feel whole again.
“Marina,” Laz says quietly.
I can only stare at him, the tears flowing down my cheeks in rivers.
I’m flayed in front of him.
He reaches out to touch me.
I stumble backward. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t…”
“I didn’t want this to happen. I tried…”
“You did NOT try!” I am seething. I am both indigo pain and white-hot anger. “You didn’t try Laz and you know it. You got scared. You got scared and you ran because that’s what you do.” My throat starts to close up but I manage to get the words out. “You’re right in that you don’t deserve my love. The man who deserves my love is someone who gives as much as he takes. Who faces the fears head on and moves past them. Who has hope. Who tries. You, Laz, you’re stuck in the past. Stuck with what’s easy, what’s shallow. You sing songs that don’t belong to you, you pen poems that you don’t let yourself feel. You’re a fraud, even to yourself. You don’t even know who you are.”
I’ve hurt him. I can tell, see it in his eyes. My words are weapons and he’s feeling them, he’s feeling them.
Good.
It’s about time he fucking wakes up.
“Now, if this is it, if this is what you want, to break up with me, to leave me, then go.” I point to the gate. “Get the fuck out and go.”
He stares at me.
“If you don’t love me, if you don’t even want to try, then go! You are nothing to me anymore, you got it? Not your lover, not your girlfriend, and definitely not your friend. Never your friend. Friends don’t play with each other’s hearts but that’s exactly what you just did.”
His mouth opens to say something.
I don’t care anymore.
“GO!” I scream, the word ripping out of me.
His eyes widen.
He turns.
Storms off around the pool, through the gate, and then he’s gone.
Laz is gone.
He’s gone.
My heart has gone with him.
I fall to my knees, crying, then to all fours, then to the grass below.
I cry and I sob and I scream and I don’t care about anything else right now except the pain inside me. This horrible, sickening pain that eats away at me like I’ve been doused in acid, burning from the inside.
I don’t know how long I cry like that, in my bee suit, on the lawn, the hum of bees occasionally going past.
I think about Laz. I think about my mother. I think about my father. I think about pain.
I’ve lost my best friend.
How will I ever be whole again? How will I ever be me again?
The emptiness inside me expands. Sobs shake my body to the blackened core.
Pickles, my father’s cat, my new cat, comes over to me, rubbing up along my shoulders.
Then a shadow looms over me from up above and for one painless second I think it’s Laz. It’s Laz and he’s come back to tell me that he was wrong. That he loves me and was too stupid to realize it.
“No man is worth this kind of sorrow, sweetheart,” Barbara’s croaky voice says.
I glance up to see her standing in a black silk pajama suit. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen her outside in the sunshine like this. It’s like she lives in a black and white world.
“Come on,” she says, offering a bony hand covered in shining rhinestones and costume jewelry rings. “Get to your feet. Act like a lady.”
Barbara is thin and ancient but she’s stronger than she looks. She helps me to my feet and then looks over me with what seems like disdain. Her penciled brow is raised, her red painted mouth pursed, her gaunt face layered with pale foundation. Her ash blonde hair is pulled back, covered by a red, sil
“Sometimes there’s nothing a good cup of tea won’t fix,” she says eventually. She pats me on the cheek then grabs me by the arm and leads me off to her house.
But tea won’t fix this. Nothing will.
Time has a funny relationship with the heart.
After my mother died, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about her, didn’t miss her. Not just missing her but aching for her. The love she gave, the space she filled in my life. My mother was everything to me and she continued to be everything afterward, even though she was no longer with us. My heart bled and burned with the same kind of intensity as it loved.
I honestly never thought I would move past it. I didn’t think there would be a day where I wasn’t crying, where I wasn’t praying for her to come back, calling for her in the middle of the night. I didn’t think my future had any peace, any places for my heart to finally be at rest.
But slowly, little by little, things changed. The heart adapted. I never got used to the actual pain of losing her but I got used to the fact that it was a part of my life. It lived with me, became not quite a friend, but a companion. It was dependable. And as time went on, I learned to manage it.
It still hasn’t gone away, that pain. There’s still a place inside me that’s carved out and hollow, the space she filled when she was alive. That companion of mine, the pain of loss, lives there, dependable as always. Some days I pay attention to it, some days I don’t but it’s always there. I guess that’s what people mean when they say the ones you love and lose are always with you because they are. If not their spirit and soul, then it’s the constant reminder that you aren’t quite whole.
But while I learned to live with that, learned to adapt and cope and somehow come out the other side as a functioning human being, I’m not sure how to deal with the blow Laz has dealt me.
I’ve lost my best friend.
And the more that time goes by, the more my heart hurts.
The more it weeps for him.
The more I feel like this is something I will never get used to, never learn to live with, never look at as a companion.
I am angry.
I am so fucking angry.
I am hurt. I am in pain. I am made of emptiness and sharp objects.
I have been swallowed up by an endless void.
What makes this loss so different is that Laz isn’t dead.
He’s still out there. He’s still alive. He’s a life force that’s moving along with the time and the longer time stretches, the further apart we become.
Most of all, I’m angry at myself. Because I knew this about Laz. I knew that he was like this, I had seen it with my own eyes over the years. I knew he ran when things got too deep and things got way too fucking deep, way too fast.
I forgot that just because I was feeling something, it didn’t mean he was. I assumed—never fucking assume—that when you loved someone like a friend, and then you threw in sexual attraction, that it equaled romantic love. I thought it would be as easy for him to fall in love as it was for me, because all the basics were already there.
Friendship plus sex equals love.
But my equation was all wrong.
It only added up for me.
And I made the biggest mistake by thinking it added up for him.
So in a way, I pushed him away.
I scared the ever-living shit out of him.
I blindly, boldly, told him I loved him because I thought that’s what he wanted, needed to hear.
It wasn’t.
He ran.
I made something fun and easy become something else.
It’s just…
I love him.
I love him so fucking much that at times it felt like my heart was big enough for the whole world to live in. I thought that love could save me, save him. I thought that love was the biggest most badass force in this universe, capable of doing the impossible.
I believed in love.
I believed in the impossible.
And most of all, I believed in him.
So I’m angry at myself because I messed everything up. I came on too strong. I should have kept my feelings to myself, because really, it was selfish on my behalf anyway. I told him I loved him because it made me feel better.
And now…I’ve never felt worse.
The pain has had me locked in my bedroom for days, sleeping and crying and screaming. I’ve been through a million boxes of tissue, their crumpled, soggy corpses littering the ground. My voice and chest are raw from bawling.
Sometimes Barbara will make the trek across the backyard and come get me or bring me tea.
Most times I’m alone.
It’s been a week since Laz left me with my shredded heart in my hands and I haven’t even told my dad or Margaret. I’m too ashamed. It’s embarrassing to tell someone you were dumped, even if it’s your family.
I did tell Naomi. But only yesterday.
Today, she’s sitting across from me at a café in Santa Monica and staring at me over her cup of coffee. She doesn’t look pleased.
This is why I waited so long to tell her. Because she saw this coming. She was right. And I should have listened to her instead of acting like a lovestruck teenager.
“Again,” I say slowly, taking out a jar of my own honey from my purse and spooning it out into my matcha latte, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
She watches my honey operation, brows raised, and then says, “I’m your friend, your best friend. Especially now as Laz has been ousted from that spot. I know I say things you don’t want to hear, I know I’ve been miserable lately. But believe me, I want to know when these things happen. I want to be that first person you call. I call you. You’re my person, I should be yours.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re forgiven. Lord knows I was doing crazy shit when Robert…well, anyway. But Laz isn’t Robert.”
“No, he’s not.”
“And honestly, even though I gave you shit over him, I am still surprised this happened.”
I look up at her. “Really?”
“Marina…I don’t care what Laz told you but that boy, he loves you.”
“As a friend,” I say quietly.
“No. Not as a friend. He is in love with you.”
Please don’t say shit like that, not now. Please don’t give me hope.
“Naomi,” I say, my voice measured as I look her dead in the eye. “He told me he didn’t love me like I love him.”
“Well,” she says thoughtfully, “maybe that’s true. Maybe your love scares him because it’s so big and joyful. He’s not like you, Marina. You guys are very much opposites in some ways. He’s dark and moody. You’re bright and sunshine. Yes, you have darkness and yes he can be a goofball sometimes. But it’s not hard to reason that you might approach love differently.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I just said. You threw yourself at Laz. You slept with him, lost your god damn virginity, finally, and you launched yourself in that relationship. Heart open, not caring or even considering that you could get hurt. You wanted to love him freely because that’s how you do. You’re giving and you’re generous, so why would falling in love be any different for you.”
I chew on my lip, mulling it over. She’s right. There was nothing holding me back. Even when I was scared, I was at the mercy of my heart and my heart wanted him. Every single part of him.
I was a greedy girl after all.
“But Laz,” she goes on. “Laz keeps his cards close to his chest. He doesn’t let people in, even his friends, even his best friends. He’s guarded and I’m sure with good reason. He loves you, Marina, he’s in love with you. It’s plain to see on his face, the way he fucking adores you. Even Robert never looked at me that way but I looked that way at Robert and that’s how I recognize it. But Laz loves you the way that Laz loves you. Tentative. Scared. Unsure. It’s not going to be revealed all at once, it’s not going to hit him al
I shake my head. “I don’t even want to think about this. When someone tells you, several times, they don’t love you. And they won’t even try. Someone with his track record on top of it, then I’m sorry, but I’m going to take their word. Even if he is in love with me and doesn’t recognize the feeling, let’s say, he still told me he wasn’t. He said the words when he didn’t have to. That’s a big thing. It’s a horrible thing. He knew it would crush me. Now I’m so far smashed into the ground, I’m not even sure if I’ll ever pick myself up.”
She sighs. “You’re right. I don’t know why he had to tell you that. And he did. So we can chalk it up to him being extremely immature for his age, for not knowing how to deal with relationships, with feelings. We can chalk it up to a lot of things. But the most important thing is that you will pick yourself up again. It just takes time. Let yourself feel this blow. It’s going to hurt whether you run from it or not so just accept that for the next while, you are going to cry randomly throughout the day and want to put holes in the wall. It sucks but you will get through it.”
I know Naomi is right and that she’s just gone through it herself.
But still…I don’t know how to survive.
So many times I’ve wanted to pick up the phone and call Laz.
Text him.
Spy on him on Instagram.
I haven’t done any of that.
And I haven’t heard a word from him.
When he left…he really left. Like he was fleeing the scene of an accident and I was the flaming wreckage he had to escape. Didn’t look back once.
“He doesn’t even care,” I say bitterly. “He told me he didn’t love me, broke up with me and then moved on.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He hasn’t even called.”
“Would you want him to call?” she asks. “If he called you right now, would you even answer it?”
I shake my head. “No. There’s nothing to say to him.”
“Then I’m going to guess he knows that.”
“He could try…”