You Need To Let Me Go

You make sick, but not because of anything you said or did. In fact, you did everything “right”; you were everything a teenage girl could have wanted and you tried every trick in your awful, chivalrous book to make me yours. Truthfully, the only thing wrong with you was your inability to realize that my heart could never settle in this hellish, monotonous town you called home. My soul was always too restless, too wild, for a place like that but you put in every calmly predictable effort to rein me in regardless. Didn’t you realize it was impossible?

You make me sick with every sideways glance and with every strained conversation. My insides roll like a ship caught in a current on the ocean with every text message that blinks across my phone.

I remember the way you used to hold onto me, thinking I would be content to stay wrapped in the everyday banality that was your world, and I remember the way I brutally threw your heart away as if it meant as little to me as a used tissue.

You make me sick because of the way I played your heart and head against each other. In some weird experiment, I poured gasoline over both of them and accidentally on purpose dropped a lit match to see which would survive the torrent of flame that erupted. I burned you and your big, grossly forgiving heart but you rose from the smoke and ash practically unbroken and asked forgiveness for whatever you did wrong.

How could you? How could you be so blind? I ruined you for my own sport and you thought you were wrong. I sent you away again, this time burning the bridge behind me so you couldn’t follow. And it tore me apart farther than I ever imagined it could.

Why? Why did you keep trying? What brought you back to me when it was obvious that you didn’t stand a chance when there was a match in my hand? I was nothing short of a savage when we were together. I took your heart straight from your chest and bent it every which way until my fingers created two bloody halves. Was that not painful enough for you? Could you have been that naïve?

You make me sick because you came back into my life expecting a different ending. You make me sick because you refused to let go. You make me sick because, after everything, you still cared.

And, darling, I still remember.