The Thrills and Pitfalls of the Heart and Soul- a portfolio of micro-fictions. The Ick.

 The Ick 

Two weeks ago he had been my entire world. Head over heels I was, and all the other cliches to go with it.  

Naively, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly something can change. 

 In fact that is a lie, I know full well nothing changes quite as quickly as love.  

 

Alex, or Lex to his closest friends, was simply delicious. Clean flawless skin and the kind of hair that is well styled, without being intimidatingly groomed. It was his soul I had fallen so deeply for though.  

 

He could make me laugh like nobody else could, without even trying! I had felt like a teenager in his presence. Not in an awkward acne and PMS way, but a fun, sexy, carefree way, with a whole life of possibility and hope, spread before me.  

There is something about him that just makes me feel like, me.  

Or at least, there had been.  

Before.  

It had been going so, so well until he began to distance himself with barely perceptible increments.  

And then... 

The Ick.  

Out of nowhere, a high-speed train of aversion, not stopping at this station, mowing me down and taking every good feeling away in its wake, like tin cans on the back of a movie wedding car.  

The Ick, swooped down and sat on my chest with unprecedented, persistent fury. 

My friends had tried their best to reason with me. To encourage me with hopeful expressions and kind words, assuring me it was something trivial, tiny. Even suggesting I might be on the shelf forever at this rate. Rude. 

But that is the problem with the Ick. 

 It's like a seed, harmless until it grows a shoot. Then the shoot grows up and roots grow down. They spread; suddenly the disgust builds into a tree of maggoty apples, and you wonder if he always held his fork like that, or if that awkward little shuffle dance (that gives you secondhand embarrassment for days) is how he usually steps off the escalator.  

Before I knew it, I was cornered in an endless loop of overanalysing and aversion. The Ick's growing and spreading like wildfire until even the way he opened a letter made my skin crawl.  

Still, my friends tried to work on me.  

“Aimee you have to get a grip.” They pleaded.  

“Just try to look past these things.” They suggested. 

 

But it was far too late for all that. 

 

It might have been something small to begin with, a tiny seed of grossed outness, but the Ick is firmly rooted now and those strange, shiny little loafers were only the beginning of the forest.