An Open Letter To Toxic Love

This is for you. This is for the nights I screamed so loud the world could hear me. This is for the hope you gave me. This is for the end you made so easy. 

My mother always told me not to play with fire but you were so fucking warm and everything I felt was ice cold. I thought you could fix every frigid feeling, but you were a Band-Aid fix for a gunshot wound and now I can’t help but think I should have bled out. I thought you would end the war but what I now realize is that you started it. Your soft blue eyes pulled the trigger as I stared into them and begged you to do it. I gave you every weapon you needed to destroy me. And just like that you had all the answers; from what made me cry to what kept me up every night.

You had every piece of me that you needed, I willingly handed them over as if you could put me back together.

You warned me you weren’t good at puzzles but I convinced myself I could become easy enough to understand. As if I wasn’t a storm passing through town, as if I wasn’t a lock with a broken key.

The idea of love is a funny thing, when it’s just within your reach you can believe anything is possible. I thought I had spent my whole life waiting for you but I’m only now becoming who I should be without you. That little glimmer of hope is detrimental to a girl like me. The first time you touched me I felt it all over my body but a third-degree burn always hurts more later on.

The truth is you hurt me for years and I ignored it because I know I’m difficult. You had me convinced it was supposed to be that way, as if my pain was my punishment for not being easy to love.

But can we call that love? I called it love because I cried in the bus station when you left. You called it love because I noticed you the way nobody had before. Everyone else called it love because we couldn’t be apart. 

We were never meant to last. We fucked each other up and called it love because neither of us could walk away.