The Illusion of Options

New shoes. New lipstick. A new lover.

Someone to hold you while you drift off to sleep in a drunken trance.

But then everything looks different in the morning light.

Scars look severe and angles don’t look soft anymore, the way they did on that dimly lit dance floor.

It is then that you know that you deserve better and so does this person you barely know. They deserve better than someone who’s only just clinging on to the bones on their body with glue made out of cheap booze and half-smoked cigarettes.
The illusion of “better” though. The illusion of options.

This vain thought that maybe someone better will come along. A new person is a new high. It is not better people you are craving.  It is the high of being loved by someone new, because it becomes harder and harder for you to believe that someone who actually took the time to know you, could love you.

That someone who knows the little quirks about you could be simultaneously in love and annoyed with you. It becomes inconceivable to you that as the layers you created around yourself slowly peeled off, this person still stuck around. You suddenly feel raw, vulnerable and terrified. It dawns on you that you’ve let your guard down and it is only a matter of time before they invade your soul and destroy you. Like the people in the past did. No. You can’t let this happen yet again. It is now time to wear all the layers, and become all new and shiny for a new and shiny person. It’ll be wonderful I swear, at least up until the time the layers start to wear off.

And yet there is that tiny little part of you that whispers every time you meet someone new: maybe this will be the love that’ll hook my heart and change everything. Maybe this time. Maybe this time.