I Can't Force You To Love Me But Dystopia Might

in my wildest dreams we’re forced to forgive each other

when i was in love with my best friend, i fantasized about dying in her arms. i wanted to feel her tears hit my face. i wanted her to realize she loved me too late. and i dreamed about the rage she’d go into afterward. i wanted to be loved enough to be mourned destructively and vengefully. it did nothing for me to imagine us on normal dates. it felt fantastical to ask her to love me — it required an equally fantastical situation.

i can’t force you to love me but dystopia might. more often than i care to admit, i fantasize about us in life or death situations with all our history attached.

us in the hunger games. me volunteering because my refusal to watch someone die outweighed my desire to live. you getting reaped with no one to volunteer for you, because everyone loves you but not enough to die for you. everyone thinks you’re so beautiful — it’s a shame to see you go. (realistically, someone would volunteer for you. you’re just that type of person).

effie and haymitch would have us hold hands and not catch how our eyes twitch at it. they’d ask if we know each other and we’d leave them with a pregnant, “we know each other well enough.” we’d have a history that the two of us know. our silence is an acknowledgement in itself.

we’d be forced to pretend to like each other to market the star crossed lovers bit. i’d be reluctant. you’d be suspiciously good at finding nice things to say about me. i think i idolized katniss and peeta because i also know that love is something you have to soften into.

whatever animosity we had towards each other would dissipate as soon as people started dying. in my wildest dreams we’re forced to forgive each other. what made the hunger games unrealistic to me wasn’t the war or the child sacrifice — it was the idea that hate can alchemize into love.

eventually we’d get to the point where one of us lets it slip, that we have a history that contextualizes our silence up until now it’ll be something offhanded. maybe a “you’ve always been this way,” or, “you used to not be that way.” everything will come crashing down when we acknowledge that there’s a “before” to our story.

contact would be inevitable. i’d patch up your stab wounds. you’d change my bandages. we’d both pretend like we haven’t seen each other’s bodies in a different context. i want to know everything you’ve ever thought about me. i like that certain death is like a truth serum.
i’d say something like, “you know, i never actually hated you.”
you’d say something like, “this would be easier if you did.”

i feel cheated. apocalypse literature promised me love. love in the face of a corrupt government. love in the face of climate failure. love in the face of abject hopelessness. we have all of those things. where is the love that was supposed to convince me that the world was worth fighting for.