Special Case

I'm sitting in my sticky-hot room in my leopard print silk robe (courtesy of the sale bin at Victoria's Secret), fan on high, thinking about boys. A boy, in particular. A man, to be more specific. An exception, to make things confusing. I think everyone has that one special case, that one person that, despite everything, they'd go running back to in a second if given the chance. Why is that? How do these people get a hold on you so very deeply, and, do you think the hold is just as strong for them?

I have one exception. 

He undermines all the girl-power advice I give to my girlfriends, challenges the independent woman that I see myself as who doesn't need (or want) him, and continuously draws me back in, closer each time. These situations should be easy: you want someone, they can't give themselves to you completely, you walk away- there should be no room for settling, for making an exception. So why is it that everyone does? Everyone thinks to themselves, next time I will walk away, next time I won't kiss them, next time I'll say, "I want all of you or nothing at all." But instead we say minuscule adaptations of what really should be said because we we're afraid of what the answers to the hard questions might be.

I want to ask, "When you can see that I care deeply for you and have been there fighting and trying from the start, what makes it so hard for you to love me?" Instead, I make excuses for my exception. I ask watered-down versions of this in the hopes that I can catch a glimmer of the underlying emotions he keeps hidden. I understand that I've allowed him to be an exception- he knows it, his best friends know it, my best friends know it. Constantly I'm being told, "He doesn't deserve you...Let him go, move on...You can do so much better...Why do you keep going back to him?" The more they ask me. lecture me, plead with me (both his friends and mine), the more I seek him, the more I feel in my stomach and in the deepest crevice of my heart that part of him is stuck in me, I care without question. He stares at me with his deep, dark brown eyes, the eyes that find mine across rooms of crowded people and penetrate through me, and I can't decide if I can trust what they tell me is hidden in the dark red corners of his heart. I want to hear him speak the words his eyes whisper.

you see right through me