Shadow Man

It’s almost comical -

how perfectly my life aligns with a drama-romance movie.

The guy and the girl -

In each other’s lives,

but never cross paths

The tantalizingly slow buildup,

with the inevitable conclusion – passionately engrossed in each other’s mouths in the middle of a baseball field.

This should never be viewed as a good thing

It’s a creeping nightmare that you can’t wake from

(Perhaps I only feel this way because I was robbed of my conclusion).

He inadvertently follows me everywhere

I moved back to my parent’s house, he moved five minutes away

He has the same generic first name as the three-year-old child that I nanny

and love.

I’ve deleted his number out of my phone 25 times

Now I have it memorized.

He tells me he loves me (over the phone)

Then disappears from my life for 2 months.

What makes me feel worse, more than my continual wish for him to evaporate out of existence, is that I want him to stay.

I never want him to leave,

but accept his absence when he’s gone

There are periods of long silence – virtually no communication between us

I only hear his name through friends, and random girls basking in the gossip of being a part of his long line of sexual partners

I pretend not to care.

Use protection

I usually tell them

He gave me HPV.

I wasn’t mad when I received the embarrassingly degrading phone call from my doctor

I love him

So it’s easy to forgive how much he hurts me.