Living by the code

[amine_eyes]

 

If you live by the code, that defines you, makes you who you think you’re meant to be.

Don’t talk about sex with someone other than your girlfriend, laugh, be funny, smile, act like you never have a care in the world.

It makes you get up out of bed in the morning, when you’d rather burrow under the covers and hide from the world, and it makes you go to sleep at night when you’d rather be in someone else’s bed.

It makes you say “I love you” to the person who you’d rather leave, who you would rather not be there so you can be free and live your life how you want it.

Sometimes (though you never tell anyone), as you lie awake in bed next to them in the early hours, hearing them snuffle into the quilt, feeling their arm thrown over you like you’re a giant teddy bear, you fantasise about catching them in the middle of a torrid affair with someone else, then you won’t seem like the bad one if you broke up.

The code makes you ignore the person you’d rather be with, it forces you to joke with them and be merry but to never get past the friends barrier, to never see the real person who you know is under there waiting.

It forces you to never drink so much that your memories are obliterated, because you fear that you’ll either tell them how you feel and get rejected, or wake up beside them with no memory of how you got there, or why you feel as though you’ve just had sex.

You can never quite decide which one is the worst option.

It makes you sit on a set with them, laughing and whispering like two little school-boys, under the watchful eye of about two million people, knowing that all they see is two friends, knowing the public is watching for any move you make that is out of the ordinary, that isn’t natural, and then they’ll pounce like rabid wild animals.

It makes you draw an arm around your ‘partner’ at Sunday dinner, when your parents ask when you’re going to get married, and smile as though it will happen.

It makes you always look the same, because it’s the norm, yet you wish to one day walk into a barbers, and get them to chop off all your ridiculous blonde hair, maybe dye the new lot purple, so you don’t feel as much of a child desperately trying to be funny in hopes of making their crush laugh.

It makes you change your t-shirts so you’re not always wearing the same stuff day-in day-out (however you rebel by always wearing blue when he’s on the show – he said it makes him happy to see you in it, even if you wish he could see you with it off. And maybe his clothes as well. Scratch that, definitely no clothes involved for either party).

It makes you never sit next to him when the panellists go out drinking after successfully wrapping a show, the temptation to wrap your hand around his, bury your face into the crook of his neck and be tickled by his hair, which is persistently in that silly stage between short and cropped, and long and curly, smell his drink-fags-sex smell that leaves you gasping if you’re not prepared, is just too much.

When you see him and anyone else hug, the code makes you laugh and joke about whether they’re having sex, yet your heart breaks just a little more inside every time.

The code makes you answer “I’m fine, I’m happy, nothing could be better” when you’re asked the obligatory how-are-you by people, by him, by your ‘partner’, when you really want to answer “No I’m not fine, I want to do what I want, I want to be me” (and if he asks, answer “fuck me! Now!” and remove words from the equation and just kiss the answer).

The code makes you live normally in a normal life, in a normal world, when inside, you know that it’s not normal, that what you want and what you are will always be different, will never reconcile, and it makes you feel broken.