An Ode To The Narcissist I Once Loved

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the bath, letting my fingers make love to the bubbles I made, thinking about how nice it would be if they could wash away your mistakes, scrub away all the memories you wish you could forget – the ones haunting your skin and making you feel unclean. How satisfying it would be if bubbles were that cleansing, that magical, if they were all you needed to disinfect the wounds; if it they were all I had to run my skin through to be able to forget I ever loved you.

I did. I loved you – the you I’m sure you weren’t, the you that you wanted me to see, and even the you I started to recognize was there behind the many other layers and piles of bullshit. I even held on to that love after I finally started to recognize the human being that you are. I see you, I see the human so vividly and so lucidly now; I see the human but I don’t see any humanity.

The more and more I think about it, the more amusing I find it how much you love your coffee, when the steamiest of cups wouldn’t be enough to warm your cold bones and frigid soul; and how fitting that you take it as black as you bruised my heart, and as bitter as the taste you left in my mouth. That’s all you left me with, that taste I’m still ridding myself of.

And you left me even more broken than when you came across me and zeroed me in as your target. I fell in love, I thought I saw something, I found those eyes so sad, but today it’s so liberating to realize all they’ve ever been are empty. You stole the light right out of mine, how could you have dared, with all your lies, your cheating, your perfect ability of turning the tables on me, with all the moments you ever made me feel not good enough, the lists of ways you claimed I needed to change, and all the times you made me apologize for what never was my fault.

You sucked that glimmer right out of me, but you don’t get to keep it. It’s not yours, it never was. The best day in my life by far has been the day you last pulled out your blade on me, the day I finally was able to say enough. Since that day I’ve been out here, living and breathing, 180 pounds of a demon lighter, healing, no longer bleeding, slowly regaining that light I had that you snuffed out. I’ve been massaging happiness back into this heart, and filling it up with so much self-love, and you, you need to dust the cobwebs off of yours to reach it.

I know you “love me” today only because I don’t, and you need me only because I realized just how much I don’t and never did, and you realize just how much I’m worth only because I can finally see you.

I don’t love you anymore. I don’t know who the person I did was, I just know it wasn’t the real you. And I know if you really loved me you’d leave me alone, but the truth is the meaning of that four-letter word is worlds apart from within your reach, and I’m a bubble bath further and further away from the memory of you.