Best at Being Second Best
Because that’s the only love she knows.
A frozen image of a house bathed in glorious sun rays. The soothing yet bright colors radiates warmth. A home. No. It used to be a home. Now it’s just an old empty house. Like what all photographs are, a memory.
Slowly, the color of the house fades and turns dull brown. Unkempt.
The image now looks three dimensional.
A woman stands in front of the house, with a flowing white dress. Barefoot. Her eyes, sad. Longing for something. She approaches the house slowly. Her eyes are transfixed at the door when suddenly —
Her eyes snap open, waking up from the dream. She finds her eyes wet from tears. She was crying in her sleep.
A man next to her with a wrapped arm around her is completely oblivious. Undisturbed. She heard his peaceful low snore. A drop of tear falls to the man’s shoulder blade. She wipes it immediately.
For a long second, she gazes to the corner of the room. Staring into nothingness. Recovering from the recoil of her dream.
She drowns her face onto his chest. Trying hard to give in to her slumber and avoid the morose feeling that old house stuck under her skin.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
She wakes up to the soft alarm sound. The other side of the bed is empty. He’s gone. As always. The morning has never been her ally. The people she’s met are always the ones who swim in the dark. Who indulge in the depth of the night to hide from what is bright. To hide their scars. To hide their shame.
She turns off her alarm and sits on the edge of the bed. She’s naked. She peeled her skin off last night, peeling off all to see her untamed lust that conjoined with his. His flesh is her bed. Her love is the covers. Nothing else. She imagined if there was a movie about her, it would be titled “Bedfellow”. The violent kind of love.
She’s loved too much. Way too much.
She has learned to love. She has learned to be broken. She has learned to break.
More than once. All at once. Once more.
She understands what it means and how it feels to give all her love. Her infatuation. Her heart.
She doesn’t want to ask anything in return.
Every night that she doesn’t spend alone is a gift for her. She loves unleashing her monster as the dying moonlight is the only thing she would wear. The destructive warmth creeps under her skin when someone meets her monster. She lets her soul bleed through the lucent wounds she carves herself. She fills the void savagely when night comes and gives it to someone who’s willing to stay with her for the night. She would play pretend and smile to the fact that being their second best is enough to replace the absence of light in her veins.
And when morning comes, she’s left alone again. Stitching her skin back on. Keeping her monster caged.
That’s what she’s best at. Shine in someone’s darkness. To be someone’s second best.
The second best. That’s what she identifies herself as. She always sees herself as an emotional mess that nobody can deal with. Throughout all the failed relationships that were weaved with her gloomy veins, she’s always believed that she’s just not good enough. Or maybe good enough, to be just that.
She’s always been the one loved, but not wholly. She’s always been the one met first, yet also left first. She’s always been the one cared about, but not remembered. She’s always been the one searched for, but with no attachment. She’s always been the one who loves too much, and that’s never more than a one way feeling. She’s always been the one who adjusts her schedules or life to fit other people’s, but gets abused emotionally in return. She’s always been the one who replies to text messages instantly, but left waiting and hanging on a broken string instead. She’s always been the one who hears you’re-too-good-for-me but abandoned for one they’ve just met or an ex-lover. She’s always been the ‘mistake’ or ‘that night didn’t happened’. She’s always been the one who chases, but never gets a chance. She’s always been the insecure one, and she validates that from all those brokenhearts.
She’s always been the one who’s not good enough. Who’s never enough.
It was a long time ago when she realized that she’s always been the second best. The second choice. The backup plan. Option B. Or you know, just an option. She carried that label throughout her adolescence until she decided to just settle as that. Ever since, she’s been in ‘relationships’ where she serves best as fulfilment, as one’s getaway, as an intimate partner.
And she feels enough being just that.
Someone who knows her secret once asked, “Who was the first guy who left you for someone else?”
She keeps repeating I don’t remember. But that’s a lie. She knows exactly who.
She looks longingly at a picture of a woman, her long hair flows on her shoulders effortlessly. Her tanned skin, glows under the sun.
There she is, she thinks. The first woman she was left for.
The woman who gave her first ever broken heart. The woman who makes her question herself everyday.
The woman who makes her look into a mirror every morning and all she can see is a ghost, haunting and taunting her, slicing the rim of her reflection as if she’s a cut out paper doll ready to be crumpled after being played with.
The woman who makes her experience a feeling that crawls deep under her skin, though she knows it will weigh her down like a boulder waiting to cause an avalanche, yet she still stays at the time she should have left.
The woman who makes her question how much sanity she still possesses and compares it to her worth, puts a price tag on each and decides what’s more important to have.
As always, she is being overly dramatic in her own head. It’s really not that woman’s fault that she ends up broken like this.
The woman doesn’t know her, but she knows the woman.
The woman is not aware of her existence, but she is fully aware of her step sister’s existence.
She doesn’t blame her father that she got to this point. She just knows that he started it all. He left her for this woman. He left her mother for this woman’s mother. He taught her that she is destined for being the other one. And ironically, she could proudly say that she’s good at it.
The woman is ten years younger than her. Sometimes she would compare herself with the woman. She makes her own scenario in this tiny bubble of hers and creates a scoreboard, her name and the woman’s on it. She puts the woman’s score based on her mere observation from the photographs. Sometimes she makes it a tie, but in the end, the woman always wins. That’s how she lives her life. She comes in second, and she makes peace with it because that’s where she belongs. She’s given up on true love. The lonely world that she lives in, is enough.
She has only one photograph of her father. On the crumpled picture, she was two years old, carried on his shoulders. She keeps that picture inside her wallet, tucked deep inside a hidden pocket.
Initially she puts it there to keep her warm. Unfortunately, that memory of warmth has viciously turned into a nightmare, wrapped in tangled strings she herself created. This is her self-fabricated maze that she built, in which she forgot to construct a way out and let her stupid heart get lost deep in the knots. Now that picture serves as a reminder of how difficult it is for her to be someone’s best.
She stares at at the woman’s picture for a long minute.
It’s an image of a house bathed in glorious sun rays. The soothing yet bright colors radiates warmth. A home. A true home. The woman stands in front of the house, embraced joyfully by her Dad. Their Dad. The house doesn’t look dull like in her dream. It’s the complete opposite.
She feels powerless. Defeated. Unworthy.
She leaves and lets her worst consume her entirely.
She had tried to strive further and further to find someone who could give her a home. A feeling of home. Yet, she fails, constantly. She’s way too inadequate to experience love like that. Her brokenness might make her unworthy of love at all.
She closes her computer and sits there for a while as the clock ticks and her tears drop. She can’t ignore the darkness that clouds her slowly, until she’s swallowed whole into it.
As always, she throws herself into the thick of it all. She’s angry. She’s sad. She lets herself down for being so vulnerable. So weak. As a creature of habit, she’s used to this utter emotional chaos though it drains so much energy out of her.
She ensconces herself in melancholy because it’s safe. Nobody knows this secret place of hers. The way to feel better is to spend the night with someone who appreciates her skin. Yet, in the morning, she’d feel worse as the routine continues.
Now, everything has collapsed into debris. And she is lying in her bed, trying to detangle the knots she created. She dreamed about that moment again last night. That empty house. That broken home. The nightmare that she tossed herself into.
She’s really afraid of who she has become. A person who lets her heartache win and stomps her self-worth flat on the ground. A person who intentionally manipulate her own feeling because fearing of how much pain the truth may hold. A person who tries to empower others, but can’t even hold a string on her own fingers. She wanted to become. But not into this.
It’s not the first time she tortures herself like this. It’s a vicious cycle. She’d fall deep and she’d lift herself up again. Every fucking time.
However this time is different. She’s tired. She wants to be better. She genuinely wants to be the best.
It is not easy for her to reclaim her emotional saneness again. She’s done it over and over again in the past, session after session. Following others’ advice, telling her what to do to be better.
Now, it’s time to listen to the little voice in her head that it is time to climb out of the abyss. She’s been letting every bone in her body be broken that she couldn’t even hold her own heart.
She has put herself away in a box for so long until this breaking point. She’s best at being second best because that’s the only way she knows how to make people happy.
It will be an uphill battle. But she’ll try.
Maybe she’ll give love one more chance. Maybe she’ll fail again and get thrown back to point zero. Maybe she’ll start hurting herself again. Maybe she’ll have the world at her feet. Maybe.
It won’t be easy, but she’s going to try.
Try not to second-guess herself.
Try her best to be the best.
Whatever. She just needs some sleep now. The moon peeks over her window. Illuminating her scarred skin, caressing them as if they would heal in no time.
She doesn’t know, that in the morning when she wakes up — a friendly smile at a coffee shop will change everything. A kind soul will help her, so she could love again. So she could love herself again.
She drifts into sleep, not knowing that the sun will become something she anticipates the most.
