I’m not sure if I miss you. I tried to. How do you miss someone who was in a different relationship than you were? Is it just the errant inside joke you miss? Is it the first time we really hung out that I miss? I don’t know. I can’t make much out of this. You’re an apparition to me right now, a thousand light years gone from our last embrace. How do I miss someone who wasn’t really there?
Speaking of you in past tense feels like I always knew the end was coming. I began to expect us to fall off, if not fall out. I know my track record with ghost love. I know yours, too. I think it did something for you. To be the ghost this time was to be in control of who left whom, and when. You didn’t have to scare yourself with “what if,” as long as you got to do the discarding and deceiving. Huh. Hmm. Hmph. You needed the appearance of balance for the sake of narrative. Feigning equanimity and only losing your shit when there was an easily exaggerated, faux righteous anger meant I had to be the irrational one. I was the heavy, the emotional, the difficult, the dizzy magpie femme who couldn’t possibly be as serious a human as you*. I had to have something wrong with me to justify your continual blurring of lines. If it wasn’t because I was broke, it was because I was sickly. If it wasn’t that, it was always something. One day it was, “you live alone,” as if I don’t live spitting distance from 3 people who’d happily help me if I needed them. As if my mama nem aren’t just a phone call and a 30 minute rideshare away. You needed me to need you; I never did. That was how you expected to balance your desperate need of me.
I didn’t see it until I saw it. Once I did, my vision wouldn’t let it go. It appeared in my periphery like a creeping grim reaper. It shadowed my eyes when I looked your way. I couldn’t look at you. I couldn’t handle it. I felt like every time I said I had to go, you were going to throw a tantrum instead of accepting that you’re not the only person with my personal contact information. I began to resent you. You probably knew it. I needed space and you refused to grant it because you “didn’t understand’ what I was saying until/ unless I spelled it out for you in the most explicit detail. That was your way of letting me know I meant something to you. I see how that’s worked out.
I have been thinking, rethinking, lamenting, perseverating because I wanna be “sure” I did all I could. My brain wants me to take emotional responsibility for you, since you couldn’t be bothered once. I didn’t know it until I knew it: you were in a relationship with me that I never agreed to. Which means I was in a relationship with your specter, while you were somewhere else. I did not know you or love you how I expected. It’s only now that I’m seeing how impossible it was.
I love(d) you. I tried. Goodbye.
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* You know, my mom said you sounded envious to her, because I could get into certain rooms just being myself. I’ve begun to see exactly how right she was.
I felt this on a personal level. This is the perfect way to describe a specific relationship in my life that causes me a ton of anxiety. Thank you for putting it into words.
oh wow. That...makes so much sense. *SO* much!