Grace Basel
Sometimes I’m shocked by what I’d do to feel loved. Some people say to be loved is to be seen; others argue that to be loved is to be changed, but is the change meant to hurt, is it meant to mould your sense of self into a new shape, into someone entirely unfamiliar? Someone unrecognizable? And when does this so-called change take place? Is it meant to happen together, with the support of each other, or apart, when everything has crumbled, and you’re left to choke on the dust by yourself?
I love a boy, loved a boy. He picked my heart out of my chest and held it in his hands, not squeezing. We were together for four months, four measly months. He loved me, although I don’t know if he meant it. He held my heart and started squeezing. He got mad at me for waking up late, for crying because it hurt him when he didn’t know how to help. I could feel his hands tugging on my heart, plucking its strings to a sickly melody. He told me he was thinking about other girls. He snapped the strings, squeezed my heart til it popped, blood splattering everywhere and staining my skin. It ended in emotional turmoil for me. I couldn’t eat for weeks. I cried until I couldn’t breathe.
The change happened apart, when everything crumbled in front of my eyes, and I was left to choke on the dust alone. I held on too long to what I thought we were, to what I imagined we could become, praying that the change would happen together, and we’d support each other. Now I’m just another girl left broken-hearted by a boy who plays guitar. I don’t think I understand what it means to be loved, to be truly loved and not lusted. I don’t think I have a clear idea of what love should look like; it’s distorted and convoluted by standards set by strangers on social media. My idea of love is skewed.
Women are taught to please men, to play into their desires, to appeal to the male gaze. Social media has two sides to this: the women who play into it to feel wanted, and the women who go against it, trying to break down the system. I don’t have to appeal to men; I know I don’t, but are they only interested when I do? Is there something about me that is inherently unattractive? I don’t always try to appeal to the male gaze, but there’s a little voice in the back of my head, serving as a reminder that if I want to feel loved, I should make myself loveable, desirable. I should wear the low v-neck shirt; I shouldn’t wear too much or too little makeup. There’s an entire unspoken rulebook of what to do and what not to do if you want a guy to like you.
And it’s exhausting.
Men get away with faking it. The rise of fake, matcha-drinking, Clairo-listening, baggy jeans-wearing guys on social media is making me realise that almost everything guys do to be liked is performative; it’s all fake. I’m sure men could say the same about women: that everything we do is fake and that it’s all just to please them. I’m tired of the narrative that women should be a certain kind of pretty to be liked. Maybe to be loved is to be changed, but I’m not willing to become someone I can’t recognise so that a guy will like who he thinks I am. On the other hand, maybe to be loved is to be seen, but how much of me do you need to see to love me?
The boy I loved, the one I try and try to convince myself I hate, still tugs on my heart from a distance. His presence lingers in my mind; all I hope is that one day I’ll forget everything. I’ll never know if his words were hollow, untrue, false promises because I was too scared to ask. I clung to the hope that, somehow, someday, we would be together again, that despite our differences, we would be drawn back together and make it work this time. I know it won’t happen. There were things I wasn’t willing to do for him, and he for me.
Maybe I am drowning in a whirlpool of regret and guilt because I think it was all my fault that I wasn’t enough, that I wasn’t easy to love. Maybe I’ll be stuck there forever, in a constant loop, stuck. I have forgotten what love without lust is, what love without social media’s influence should be. If they wanted to, they would. A phrase so many people know, a phrase so many people take as truth. There are things I wanted to do for him that I couldn’t. Everyone has something that they want to do for other people that they simply cannot do. There are things he couldn’t do for me, whether he wanted to or not. Maybe he deemed loving me too difficult, so he gave up.
Losing me was easier for him than fighting for us. I know this because he moved on within a month. He moved on, and I still feel sick when I think about him, when I think about moving on from him. The idea of being with someone else makes my heart race and my head spin. For four months, there was no one else; he was the only person I wanted to spend my life with. I am stitching my heart back together. I tried to pick all the pieces. There are empty spaces, pieces that he took with him when he walked away without a goodbye.
Healing is non-linear. Some days I feel as if what happened doesn’t matter at all; others it comes crashing down on my ribcages, suffocating me, pushing tears out of the corners of my eyes. The stages of grief don’t happen in order, and they happen more than once. The only option is to take it day by day, until eventually I feel lighter. The burden of a broken love will lift off my soul.
I’d do anything to feel loved, to feel wanted. It’s unhealthy and makes my throat thick with regret. I know I wouldn’t give up my body, my boundaries, to feel loved, but I have. I am sick with the knowledge of what I have done to feel loved. Hate is acidic. It burns in your throat the same way your stomach acid does after you throw up. Gross, that is how I feel, knowing that I have done things I never wanted to with a guy that left like it was nothing to him. I bent my rules, hoping we would last. Hope never gets a girl far with an emotionally unavailable boy.
We were two twin stars, bright and burning; what we didn’t know was that our end was inevitable. Twin stars are gravitationally bound to each other; they orbit around each other. I orbited around him, and we drifted further and further away from the people who actually loved me. And in the end, I was left with bridges to rebuild, bridges that I neglected, rust taking over and metal bowing. Love is not perfect. To be loved is to be seen as who you are without any masks. To be loved is to be changed, with a gentle hand and good intentions. Someone will love me, someone
will see me as I am, will change me with a gentle hand and good intentions. Someday I will be loved.
Grace Basel is an 18-year-old student studying Photography at Otago Polytechnic. She enjoys spending time with friends, attending local gigs when she can, and doing anything creative.