To my dear first love,
I have said these things to you, as much as I can in quick bursts and flares of temper, but now I put them on the page, for me and for others. I need to break myself open and let them free because I am done loving you.
I told you you were the love of my life, and I would always love you, didn't I? I suppose I can lie too, then. Though is it a lie when I once thought it was truth?
The truth is that love doesn't exist.
It carried on, somehow, stubborn, through everything you put me through. Through all the emotional and psychological damage you inflicted on me, somehow, this love lingered. I walked away over and over because I knew, in that drowned suppressed piece of my brain that remained sane, that I did not deserve your thoughtlessness. Your voice overwhelmed her. You convinced me I needed to be unhappy. You pulled me into your self-pitying whirlpool abyss and then you scolded me for not saving you.
I knew all this time who you were, and now I go through our moments in my head and I feel foolish and ashamed on such a level I didn't know existed. I have new pity for the heartbroken and stupid. The greying women on television who fell in love with an alias and had their bank accounts emptied and still, somehow, they stare into the camera with a bewilderment and hope that somehow, somehow, they were wrong and they were truly loved.
We all want to be loved. You prefer to fall in love, though, don't you? It's much more pleasant. It's easier to hide who you are, when they don't know you. You take our love and it makes you warm inside, where you are cold and dead.
"All the pieces on the floor only wanted to be seen as their own fine work of art."
It's pretty to feel broken but it's not pretty to break others. You tried to patch yourself together with my pieces and left me clawed full of holes.
But I don't matter, do I? You're your own fine work of art. You're obsessed with your own loveliness. It's so pretty to be tragic. My story means nothing beside your own, I am only a device to propel you forward.
Dorian Gray, you smile and speak gently. Inside the dark canvas your soul prowls and rots.
I look back and I am mortified at myself. I knew you. I saw that blackness. A jangle of wrongness in the air, a confusing sensory blip. It did not make sense.
I lay on you and looked at your face in the dark and I thought, this is the face I will always want to look at. This is the one that will stay beside me, that I will keep.
It's fun to fall in love, isn't it? I didn't know. I was frightened. You took my hand and you gently lead me down a new road, and I closed my eyes and trusted you.
It was fun, catching me, wasn't it?
No one else ever had, not like that. A true prize. Hold me up and take a photo on the pier. Look what I have done. I must be beautiful and good after all, to win this.
A tension in the air that never felt right. The spider you killed, those small things that didn't suit who you pretended to be. Dropping my hand when another approached.
They grew larger and larger. You left me wandering in the dark searching for you in the orchard, abandoned and fearful, and you blamed me for my fear and anger.
That's where it began, the blaming. The avoiding. Hiding me. You caught me, the fun was done. How could I expect you to continue caring for me? It was a silly female notion I suppose, to think you would carry on with your affections.
The questions you avoided answering. The anger you directed at me that I could never anticipate. The accusations.
How did I become the woman who wanted to see your phone? I hated myself for that.
You just have to trust me, you said, and I was ashamed for my doubt. I was ashamed for being a woman who doesn't trust.
I must be cheating, since I was so suspicious of you. Tables turned, you smile victoriously. Am I projecting? I just have to trust you.
I rack my head trying to understand why you would think these things, why you saw me as you did, but now I know that it was nothing but pulling the strings of a puppet.
It confused me how you had no relationships. No friendships. A few scattered people who used you (you liked to be needed) and your drug dealer, keeping you sedated and tasting of smoke when you lied to me about being high.
Relationships are real, and you are not. Friends learn your insides, and yours are poison.
I mourned you for so long. But I'm mourning a ghost. That man who made me love him does not exist. The man who broke my mind and heart, he is the truth, he is the ugly looming face in the dark.
I can't decide if it helps, knowing there are others you've left in your wake. It's a cruelty I can't open my mind around. I think you must feel nothing. Crocodile tears. You preyed on us. I wonder how you can work with the broken and damaged and love them so, but behind you, you crush others and leave us bleeding and wounded, and do you feel nothing?
Still, somehow, at night I lie awake and I wish you would say you feel something, but I know that too would be a lie.
You're the hero in your story, but what a tale you must have to tell yourself.
We will lay you on the table and we will pick over your bones and tendons until there is nothing left, an unrecognizable carcass on the wood. Will it help us, to see your truth? Even now it's still hard to understand, and I reel at the extent you must have ruined me to continue to make excuses for you.
You are a simplicity, that is what we must come to accept. Your complicated brain, your poetry and your fast love and your fast anger strip away and you are nothing but a little violent animal, hungry. We fed you what you needed and you bit our fingers.
I wonder what she is like, this new love of yours, and I feel such overwhelming pity for her. I hope she is a pretty fool and is swallowed by your tide. I hope she is strong and sees you as you are and breaks you. I hope she is a lie, I hope one thing and another and I twist this around in my head. I overanalyze, didn't you say? I must not read into things. Because therein is the reality, and you tried to hide that from me.
I think about your past, your family, what things made you this way, but then I'm overanalyzing once more. My flame for the mind begins to burn and I want to understand why, why, why, but this is the lesson I am learning - the why is not an excuse. The why is not what made you. You built yourself, this smiling, lean, cold creation, and you and your broken pieces will wander haunting forever because that is who you choose to be.
I have no love for you left. I looked for you, my whole life. I wanted you. I thought at last my search was over, but what I know now is that that One Man for me doesn't exist. I am the cat who walks by himself again and all things are alike to me. I wanted to be in love once, and now I have been, and in all of my damaged life, it was the worst thing I've experienced.
You will always be the monster in my dreams, but that is where I will keep you.
I am happy having myself back. You took her away from me and you twisted her against me. I frightened you, didn't I? You didn't like when others listened to my voice and not yours. You hated when I was smarter than you, or kinder, or calmer. You took the best parts of me, the parts a good man would admire and nurture, and you crushed them in your palm because they made you look more dull beside me. How dare you?
You'll always be moving, trying to shine, but your light is dim, my love. Your heart is weak and clumsy and fearful. You love to control and silence and confuse. How can you ever glow? You must keep moving, my love, before the veil drops. Always forward.
I cut you from my heart and I leave you behind with nothing but contempt and disgust. I must shake off the anger and rage. That's your influence, twisting me. Making me a mad woman. It's easier to leave a mad woman. It's easier to look bright beside me in your story, when I am wild and insane. So I let it go.
I release the ruin you have done.
I won't let you leave me with that final insult. I won't let a weak black creature take my strength.
My legs shake, I have no taste for food. I force myself to eat, to rise, to smile, because you do not own me anymore. You were fucking careless with me. I am taking myself back. I am tired of weak men using me like a ladder.
I wonder where your story will go, and then I shut my mind off. It does not matter. You are a waste of my consideration, my sympathy. I have seen who you are and it is disappointing. You are small. You were never worthy of me, so you tried to make me small too.
I rise, I eat, I work hard because I know inside my sharp mouth and odd tendencies I am good and I am worthy, and I strive to be better every day and I am building myself a life. To grieve over the broken pieces you left makes me no better than you, wrapped up in maintaining my pain.
I shrug you off, I move forward. You were faster than me always, but you lack direction, you lack impulse control and motivation and ambition and I move, slowly, surely, forward while your erratic path leads you nowhere.
Goodbye to my first love, perhaps my only love. I leave you in the dirt where you belong and I rise to a new day.
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