Read This The Day You Meet His New Girlfriend
By Anath Olia
She’s the one you’ve barely noticed in the back of his childhood pictures. A sweet blurry face, looking at all but attention, hiding behind a taller guy and a heavier girl. She’s the one he mentions once or twice in a conversation. Her name just naturally coming out of his mouth when he is telling you about his craziest trip, or backing up his point in an argument you’re about to win.
She’s the one who smiled without talking much, the day he introduced you to her. Who stared insistently instead, with a clouded eye and a gentle smile on her face. While all of his other friends celebrated you noisily, picking at you and laughing to tears at your stories.
Unlike the others, she’s the one you’ve never met again. Even in celebrations, and gatherings, she never showed up. But you never realized it anyway.
She’s the one who disappeared unnoticed while you both were having the time of your lives, as clouds are shred away when the sun is finally passing by. The one who had to answer the phone to ‘sorry, I completely forgot…sorry I can’t…sorry, can I call you back later ?’ She’s the one whose name stopped popping up in casual conversations, replaced by love words and sweet sentences whispered heavily between the intense kisses and the burning touch of his skin.
She’s the one who got left behind, while he was giving all of himself to you. Picking you up when you fall, waiting with you in the rain, offering you his prettiest smiles and most delightful stares. She’s the one who got dismissed, pushed a little over, asked to shrink, because she failed where the other one managed to succeed.
She’s the one whom he started calling again, when you got a job out of town. The one he started calling, in fact, when the hard times began: All your sleepless nights working late , his days sleeping the time off. Your days of hard work and solitude, his incapacity to make it better for you. Your cold lonely mornings, his cold broke ones. Your shivering body late at night. Your cry for help. Your cry for love. And on the other side of the line, his beaten ego, his self loathing, his guilt, and suddenly… his unexpected silence.
She’s the one who knocked at his door with homemade food and random medicine, when he locked himself away from the world. The one who made him a cup of coffee, spread apart the curtains of his window, and urged him to go for a walk out . She’s the one who customized his sneakers, offered him tee-shirts with his favorite series characters printed all over, that you would have offered him if only you weren’t so far, or so down, or just so damn beaten up. She’s the one who bought a cake, lit up his face with every candle, danced him through the night, while you were at your office fighting against the deadline. She’s the one who never missed any of his birthdays.
And now, she’s the one he wakes up to every morning. The one he is cuddling in bed. The one he sings stupid songs to. The one who wiped me out of his head. I guess I only loved him with passion, while she loved him with patience. Failed to be the shoulder, on which he would constantly lay his head. So now I shrink and shrink to the size of a nut, a mere prologue to the story of his life, while he was the plot, the climax and the twist of mine.