learning to survive you

edited by my wonderful therapist :)

At the end of it all, I still don’t know how to process the pain of you, so I will bury myself in my words and take apart every single moment til I can expel you from the past 2 years that you inhabited and find myself inside of them.

The first night I found out (‘the first’, because there were so many)— I remember watching you, sleeping on my pillow, so peaceful despite everything. It was the month after my birthday, and we’d argued more than often. I told myself that it was normal, that it was just the end of the honeymoon period.

Maybe I should’ve kept telling myself that.

I could’ve just closed my eyes and gone to bed, but I think now if I had—if I’d ignored the signs, would the ugliness of your infidelity have ever found me? Would I still be living wistfully blind to your lies?

I still recall the feeling of my chest caving as I burst into those sobs—what kills me is the way you woke up to my tears and knew exactly how you had hurt me. It makes me wonder; did you know that I would find out? Did the weight of your lies ever begin to hold you down? Did you ever regret the vitriol in the lies you told me every night? Was apologising for sleeping early, never telling me you were texting him in your ‘fugue, lucid state’, was it that easy?

Does my anger, at least now, make you regret it?

I spent my childhood watching my mother pick my dad all my life, no matter what he did, and I swore I couldn’t be that person, but in the worst of you, I became like her; and that still won’t let me go. My therapist told me that growing up in a household so reliant on the mood of a singular person will so easily prime you to throw away all of yourself for the sake of one person’s feelings. And I’ll admit, there were nights I wished I’d never have given in to you; or that I’d seen the signs, because they were always there.

I bet now you’re one of those people who say they believe that there’s ‘intimacy in never speaking again’ —you always had a tendency to ride the coattails of others’ intellectual bandwagons. But I don’t carry the intimacy of our silence, because I don’t carry the burden of hiding from you. Not anymore.

Because I will never forget every single passing moment, every single place, and every way you managed to break my heart.

Sitting in the back of the bus.

‘I swear I’m not cheating; it’s just a joke! He’s straight’

‘It just felt like we were monotonous; we needed to risk something.’

‘You don’t need to know that we used to text; I don’t owe you that.’

The train, the bottom carriage— it was always in the corner. You liked hiding.

‘It’s awful, I know it is, but I guess I did it for the thrill of it.’

‘I just wanted to make sure he got home safe; it didn’t feel fair for me to not check on him.’

‘I can say that I don’t regret it; I think this was good for us.’

That park we used to walk by as I dropped you home —that stopped a year ago.

You met him there that night.

I never found out how he ended up there —but you found the nerve to complain to me his lips weren’t as good as mine. Like it was a compliment. You complained.

Because every single time I brought myself to look at you, it was a nightmare of being trapped— you unchanging as always, and still I couldn’t tear away, but I knew that it was nothing but killing time til you happened all over again.

But it was time to leave when every version of myself that I tried to become failed to be enough. It was when the realisation set in that all it probably takes is the first sleight of hand that’s not mine, for you to start slipping away. My melancholy found its way into every single moment of time that I was with you, reminding me that you would rather have anyone else but me.

I think about it now; the only time you truly were mine was before I chose to be yours; I know the chase kept you ‘thrilled’, as you so eloquently explained away the infidelity. So maybe if I stayed that way, out of your touch, but too close for you to resist, then maybe you’d have lost interest and I could’ve been a fleeting phase —not the lingering side piece I turned into.

Was I only swallowable with the others? I couldn’t even say I was the pick of the week; just his favourite palette cleanser. To wash down all your regret with your good, trophy boyfriend, was it ‘thrilling’ to destroy my personhood?

What do you call the last two years to your friends now?

And still, even at the end, I was fighting to protect you from your vanity.

‘We’re young, its okay; you’re not a bad person— you just did bad things to me. And that’s alright.’

I held so tightly to those broken strings, tethering myself to you with nothing but the sheer will of healing. That’s how you get stuck in a limbo of forcing it til it works out (or breaks down)— telling myself I’m in love, when it’s just drowning and the first sight of land; and it’s just me again, lovelorn, lovesick and lovelost because I chose you.

I put the cheating ‘aside’ and decided to lose myself in trying to save what you took from us. So it’s unfair you could hurt me so easily, because all I ever really wanted was to believe in love— it kills me to think that I probably would’ve found it too, earlier, easier, at the hands of someone far less evil— but instead, you found me and trapped me in the grey of your misery and your self-sabotage.

And yet I still didn’t want to tell our friends, because ‘I still wanted them to believe in love!’. And you laughed at me— like you tended to do; there was the difference between us: an idealist and a pragmatist. I wondered how someone like you, pragmatic as you were, could be so insistent on getting married so early? I wondered how you could feign surprise when I insisted that I could never do that. Because if I thought about our future, it was divorce settlements and you fucking the neighbour. Because I know that this is how men like you pin down docile bodies. I witnessed my mother fall into the same cycle.

And I’ll admit it was spineless to stay in the moment, helplessly adrift and stuck in all the ways you didn’t love me enough; but I couldn’t imagine how to start leaving - what to pack and how to leave behind those so dear to me. They’ll say time heals all wounds, but ever since the first time you fucked and lied, I knew how it would end; it never got better, but I finally started taking responsibility for my own feelings.

I just don't know why I stayed with the hurting. I don't have an answer for why the only perception of your love I have is pain; I whisper to myself now that power over someone does not equal love. I just know I couldn’t continue to choose a lifetime of yearning and glimpses of your full attention over myself, not again.

Because it was not about loving you; it was about surviving the year; about living with the life-altering mistakes you made and the consequences that followed became mine, but never yours. I held myself back in every single word I said to you, and it makes me think that I've never told the truth. The truth is, it’s crazy you wanted to be a gentleman to the boy you kissed for 15 minutes, but never hold any loyalty to the same one who you called your best friend for 15 months.

It’s funny to think that the breaking point might not have even been the worst of your crimes, but it was the resentment you made me swallow to substitute honest confrontation. Just because I dared to talk about you. Because I didn’t take it with a smile on my face— because you made me bitter, we’re somehow equal in your equation.

‘i miss being in love (happily, now love hurts)’ - 12th August 2024

I’ll never understand who you are, or what you are or how it happened, how I wasn’t enough, because you’ll never tell the truth. It didn’t feel fine, it’s like you were suffocating me sometimes; and the voice in my head told me ‘if you go back now you lose yourself’ but if I go forward I might lose everything. Nothing ever seemed quite right, and I don’t know how you could stomach looking at me, much less yourself, knowing that I’m going up in the flames that you so carelessly ignited.

That final realisation I couldn’t stay came in slowly, but I know I ran from it. But it was when I couldn’t recognise the person that I thought I had fallen for, because really, it was all a lie. How do you reconcile two years of falsities?

Or maybe it was when I could start to see the things you hated about yourself— when I saw the things that you didn’t even notice, that’s when the realisation set in.

And maybe it’s cruel to say that. But you stole my personhood, and I can never forgive you for that. And at the first sign of my indecision, you tried to leave, proving me right every single time.

And I’d say to you, ‘I can’t imagine my life without you’, (I see it now— it is free), don’t know if that’s why I stayed; but when you couldn’t even give me a reason, it finally began to click. I can’t care what reason you have. I can’t live wasting my youth on the greatest con of all, and living my love in the form of anxiety, a fool, begging the man who cheated to stay. There’s nothing romantic in the obsessive scrutiny I put you under, wishing you’d get better at hiding the lies.

How many times did you go back to that boy that almost tore us apart (Seven— and that was just him); did you use that line that he was the ‘█████████ ███’ you’ve seen? I know it’s your favourite line. Maybe it worked on me then, but flattery can’t bargain with your irresolute promises to change, not anymore. In your quest of self-sabotage and spineless indecision, you drew me into your swirling grey, and I’m here stilted for a lifetime, with 2 years of regret.

Did you know the extent of your treason, or how it’d break me? Did you ever care?

And I wondered for a year, if I’d have left that night, would I really feel this way? The anger, the disgust, the pain; lovelorn, lovesick, love lost in your path, knowing that you’ll move on while I’ll let the anger linger for far too long.

And now that I leave, you hold onto every part of me you can, because you can’t bear to burn those imperative chapters in the annals of your history. Who else showed you the patience I did? Whoever will? But you chose something that meant I couldn’t live with you so, so easily, and I can never understand how you did that. Was I ever worth a second thought, or did my softness spur this self-rationalised rebellion?

And I bet you tell yourself now that I ignored the guilt that shone through, and that those arguments in mid-April justified you and the way you treated me should have been repentance enough for your sin. But we will always know that only after you were satisfied, you’d come back to me— only when you were bored of the others was there space for me; and for that, there’s nothing you could do.

And I will swear off a man like you til the day I die, and you will never see the truth. There is so much hurt in my heart planted by the way you could never just stop leaving me for someone else; how do I make you understand?

I know now that I’m easy to love, to trust and to keep; you just never deserved an ounce of what I held out for you. And every moment, every breath with you compelled the performance of a lifetime, watching your eyes for the flicker of approval - by the end, I couldn’t even look at you in the face anymore.

‘because a small part of me wants to believe that something i gave you was soft enough, warm enough, good enough to survive the version of me that came after.’ - you, about me.

A flicker of understanding— but you fail to realise, fail to accept that there was no new version of you. Does your pseudo-intellectual attempt to understand me satisfy your guilt? This isn’t about taking responsibility; it's about running from guilt. This is who you always were to me. I let you own me for the false pretence of affection that I’d been so deprived of— I’m telling you, the churning hunger will make you do crazy things for scraps. And that weaponised incompetency might have only been spurred by my own complacency, but how many more of your inadequacies will I blame myself for, even still?‘

What did you do to me that I genuinely tried to extend my facets so I could be as many different people so that your attention wouldn’t flicker?

So there’s nothing romantic, nothing Greek in the tragedy of leaving me scorning. There’s nothing romantic in the way you tore apart my trust, the way you robbed me of my personhood. Hubris was never your fatal flaw; it was just cowardice.

I still feel the shame of choosing you over myself

—a year, collapsing in the palm of your ignorance and my indecision

And it hurts still to think I didn’t warrant remorse

I feel the churning anger eating me up inside— so I’m going to try letting go.

Opening up in a moment of vulnerability, and you asked me ‘Was he hot?’,

‘no.’ —it was statutory rape and the insurmountable anxiety of twenty lifetimes

& still what mattered to you was the way he looked— I won’t blame you for what he did,

but don’t tell me you want to kill yourself again

when I bring up the worst of your crimes (yes, again)—

because the coercion and revenge p█rn might send you to jail,

Suppressing and stifling the truth of it will send me to the ward.

but none of it matters anymore;

you don’t matter,

You don’t matter.

I unlearned you for my own sake

I will never grasp the ways you never considered me as human

and the ways I made you God.

You’re never going to think twice about any of it.

In the quiet moments, I don’t miss you; I just miss who I was before you. And you and your incendiary memories can try to prove that things were “good: at one point, but how could any of it be good if you were ████ █████ ████ ████ while I poured out my heart to you for the first time? I realise now you found something in them you could never find in me, but I gave you everything I could in that year. And that should’ve been enough.

People tell me now, that ‘when someone shows you who they are for the first time it is the only chance you have to run’. They ask me why I decided to stay. I ask myself that too. Because it’s easy to speak with perspective and with hindsight, but living in the moment, the fear will paralyse you— it drove us more than halfway across our expected lifespan.

So you’ll build a life on top of the remnants of me you couldn’t bother cleaning up; with the next guy that I know you’ll make your New Testament. I hope, for his sake, that he manages to be enough for you.

And recently a friend asked if I thought I could see anyone again soon— I’m surprised how quickly the desperate yes slipped out of my mouth.

Because these hands have been so empty for so long, and my eyelids unkissed, and I’ve been misunderstood for a lifetime. And I haven’t ever felt it for real.

He asked me if I thought I was emotionally available to say that confidently; it’s funny because in my head, I was wondering that too— I guess I’m not that difficult to read. But I realise a year in isolation can prepare you to love— being starved in his limitations and self-imposed prison did nothing for me.

& you don’t deserve a single bit of forgiveness. But I deserve to let go of the bitterness and anger. So I guess you win. I hope you get everything you deserve. I hope you can somehow learn to live with what you did to me.