he thinks she's "prettier"

Her blonde hair flows out of the corners of her hat – one strand kissing his jacket. Her face is proud, smiling behind him — perfectly white teeth, pink lips that just touched his and her hand grasping his shoulder — staring me right in the goddamn face. Look, I want to tell you that I don’t care – that after all these years the sight of him with some cute girl by his side doesn’t phase me. Instead, it's like seeing a very prominent venture capitalist that your boyfriend thinks is “like totally inspiring” and who he likely jerks off to every morning in the shower. I mean, come on, he knows the man's middle name, the amount of capital he invested in his last 35 companies, even the size of his briefs, and yes he knows they are briefs and not boxers … BUT to you, well, its just some old white dude who I guess has a lot of money and looks as though he has a very very unhappy and boring sex life, ya know?  That’s where I’d like for everyone to imagine my stance is with him, that I see him all loved up with a new girl, it's like… okay?  and…? Don’t care, never did. But… if we are all being honest here, that's not really how I feel. Nope not even close. Instead, it feels like I swallowed a large amount of twisted up yarn and a couple of necklaces that have those dainty knots that my nervous bitten nails are unable to ever untie. So instead I give up, put it at the bottom of my jewelry box where it will stay for the indefinite future, and I end up with a 20-necklace pile up that even the most steady hands couldn’t fix. Yep, that is far more accurate.

I mean here I am thinking about this girl who quite literally doesn’t even know I exist. I send her photos to my friends who all say the same four words, that “you are way prettier,” – which likely would have fed my enormous ego back in the day, I won’t lie. Those large green ego monsters were always ready to feed, like dogs salivating at a slab of meat. But not so much anymore. It used to be that being told you were “prettier” or “hotter” than your ex's new girlfriend or the girl he cheated on you with was like god damn magic. Like the feeling after you finish your last exam before winter break just knowing that you aced it, or the feeling of taking a bow and everyone you know, standing in unison cheering at your success. That’s what it was, the thought that you were prettier than some random girl, really just made you feel better, successful even. Like you did something right somewhere along the way and that it's all paying off in this moment where your ex’s new girlfriend makes her debut in front of the crowd of judgmental glares and no one, not one person, is impressed! Not even his friends, those guys who would incite a fight with every boy you ever dated. Their hands would always end up a little too low on your back, or those wet whispers in loud bars, or grazing lips touching your cheek, and only because you would turn your head just in time. 

But I just loved it. I did. Every bit of  the ego driven deceit, the game, the attention, my god! While your ex stood in the distance, seething, you would bat your eyes, run your hands through your hair, laugh a little too loud at some guy’s subpar jokes, all while staring directly at whichever ex was at bat, who would sip his 3 dollar beer and be seconds from punching in a wall. Even those guys didn’t look twice when she made her entrance, nope, they were still fixated on you…. That was it you see, the goal of sorts, when your ex finally moved on, or even before he did, you wanted everyone around him, everyone around you, to make him know what he would be missing if he left. And when he did leave, even his friends, his closest confidants, were not interested in his new pursuit, no, they were just happy to have him out of the way –  because that meant that those accidental grazing lips would finally have a chance at finding their way to your lips, but this time with less of a fight. 

Maybe that’s why it's no longer satisfying– the superficial compliment aimed at building you up while tearing her down – because it was and is just a game, designed to have one winner, but it was never actually you. Because even then, when you walked around with your head held high, skinny little waist, stained red lips, noticing his eyes veer away from her to you just for a moment, it still hurt. It didn’t matter if people thought you were prettier or hotter or more “fuckable.” While you and your friends secretly mocked this girl's appearance hoping she would see you and feel inferior, she was the one holding his hand; she was the one eating dinner with his mom; she was waking up next to him on cold sunday mornings and he was pulling her back into his bed for just a second longer. You could say anything you wanted about her, and make yourself feel a little bit better in that moment; but when you went home, got into bed alone, texted him to tell him you missed him, and he never responded, it definitely didn’t matter who anyone thought was “prettier” or not.

You would think after all these years I wouldn’t care — that the thought of him touching her body, tearing her clothes off, showing her off to the world — wouldn’t make me hurt but here we are. And I guess seeing a boy that you once loved with someone new – even though you are actually over him, and it's been years, and you have moved so far on that the thought of you and him seems like a laughable story that barely ever existed — it may still seem like it hurts, at least the initial shock of it. But really it's not that you wish you had him, or even that you still love him, it's something far more trivial – because at least for me, that guy that I did once love, he no longer exists. I sometimes like to think that nothing has changed, that years going by, moving away, meeting new people, starting lives with each other no longer in them, doesn’t mean that a person you once loved vanishes like the promises we made when we were 17. That if you were to meet one day back in the town we both once called home, you would see each other and it would be as if no time had passed only minutes or seconds even since you had felt his hand on yours and that little spark in your heart when you looked into his big blue eyes suddenly consumes you once again. 

But really, he has changed, and the feeling in my chest, that longed for his touch, his taste, it's not the same as it was. I loved someone who existed, sure, but I no longer know him, not really. The person who I stayed up until early hours of the morning talking to, who I would sneak into my teenage bedroom in the middle of the night through the creaky side door that somehow escaped my parents’ ears, that I would fantasize about – children running around on christmas morning, he sips on a cup of coffee and I look at him still in love after all this time. That person is now somewhere in a new life, with new friends, new stories, stories that I don’t know and likely never will, experiences that I may wonder about but will never be apart of, and goals and fears that are different than they were when we both had no plans but only the thought of high school graduation looming above our heads. 

If I was 17 again, cold under the fall night at a football game, not to watch, but to see him and make awkward conversations that I would analyze in detail once I got home. If she appeared then, with her glossy lips and perfectly toned hair just below her shoulders, it likely would actually hurt. It would hurt the parts of my heart that at the time I would think would never be whole again. But now, all it is is ego driven hunger. Hunting for a meaningless sentence that will make me smile for all but a second until realizing how much it lacks touching any real parts of my mind.  Realistically I know that he and I would’ve never worked, he knew that too, which is why he left me. He got in a plane, said goodbye to the city, moved out to the middle of nowhere to be outside in the snow, leaving me behind, a so-called “‘city girl’ incompatible with the life he wanted to live.” But the annoyance at his new found happiness  that burns inside of me  isn’t even about him. It’s not about knowing that he is no longer mine; that he is not the person he was when he was even close to being mine, but merely any ounce of insecurity I may have bubbling to the surface and being randomly directed at the first picture that popped up on my instagram feed. Instead of simply not caring about him or instead wishing him happiness, I wanted him to be  sad and alone. Hoping that  he was stuck in purgatory, longing for me (as he should be), simply pondering late at night about the life we could’ve had together. But really my name or the taste of my lips is but a forgotten memory just like the version of him that I once knew. But I am not out here longing for him either, I sit here content with the actual love of my life, never once thinking or wishing for it to be him. 

So why does it matter, you ask? It doesn’t, not until I see her that is. Only when I see her is when his name comes out of my mouth despite being completely out of practice. But not because I miss him but because of my instinct to be better than her, to be prettier than her, for him to know that I was and will always be the best thing he ever had….

In my moment of jealousy I only thought of the good times with him, the googly eyes, the sweet morning kisses, the yearbook notes of hidden declarations of love…not the tears, the fights and the lies, the feeling he gave me of simply never being good enough. That was the real issue, that I never felt good enough, and he somehow always perpetuated that feeling – and now, he was with someone who he clearly believed was good enough, good enough to show off to the world, something he never did with me. Sure, I like to think that every person I ever knew has a special place in my story, in my heart and life. That I was meant to meet them at the time that I did. And even if that's true, I need to stop allowing myself to create storylines and place importance on every single person that I meet. Not everyone deserves pieces of my heart, when my existence to them was yet a temporary time that is not so ever-lasting like I imagine. This isn’t about longing for an ex that you once thought you would love forever – its about feeling the need to compete, the need to be better, “prettier,” it's about mistaking your ego driven jealousy for romance and love. It's about not fully fixing parts of yourself that need a bit more love – especially when those parts arose in response to the pain that someone caused.  Being prettier than someone won’t make him love you. He didn’t leave me because he found someone “prettier,” he just didn’t love me, it's as simple as that. We made no sense, and although at the time I couldn’t see that, I can now and I can’t let my past feelings completely hide that fact that I have come to know. 

I, who tends to be very secure, if not sometimes over confident with myself, still have days where the dark corners of my mind filled with all my hidden insecurities pop up and control my reactions to meaningless events such as these. I just wonder if one day I will be able to see that before I mistake jealousy for pain from the past. That one day, in a few years, when he is married and so am I, I will be sitting in front of my family, in front of everything that I have always wanted and will no longer feel the need for validation from people who never deserved my love to begin with. And one day,  the pain he caused, the feelings of inferiority and jealousy that came along with it, will be a little bit more mended than I guess they are now– so that instead of any anger towards him, there will be nothing more than a simple smile as I continue to scroll on my silly little phone, unable to remember the feeling of wanting so badly for him to love me and knowing that he never would.