You Tore Us Apart, But I Stuck Around For The Pain

By

Can you recall the moment we met? Because I can. If I close my eyes tight enough I can still feel the way I did when I first saw you. I had always hoped that I made you laugh enough, and created memories that were irreplaceable. I hope that you always felt like the most special man in the world, because to me you were. I adored you right from the start, and I adored you even after. The amount of minutes I spend in a day with you on my mind is embarrassing to confess. Embarrassing because I ended up with nothing, and yet my mind keeps playing tricks on me with vivid images of you and I. It seems like a million years ago, but there was a point in time when I was happy with you. I was so happy with you. God, how I want and pray and constantly dream of being happy with you again.

Best friend. The calm to my storm, a safety net for my thoughts. My hands became yours, body parts intertwined with our lips and tongues speaking the same words. We spent many days and nights as one, sharing all of our thoughts, our dreams, and our fears. Walls were down, and I became yours indefinitely.

Then you threw it all away.

Love couldn’t make it out of the cracks of this concrete pavement that was your heart.

You just tossed me aside like I never meant anything, leaving me to question what happened to us, when did we fall apart? The realization that you no longer cared became the flame that set fire to sadness, and instead brought anger to the frontline dragging along with it resentment, hate, and revenge. Together they created the deepest wedge I’d ever experienced within myself. I was so angry inside, too broken to move on with my life and forgive you for breaking my heart. I wanted to hurt you, make you cry and fill your lungs with regret, make you realize that you lost the one person who gave you life, who brought sunshine and love into your cold, worthless, black soul. I hated you. Hated and loved, hated with love, and loved and loved you. Why couldn’t you see that?

You never heard the cries of my shattered heart or the clinks of wine glasses to wine bottles, how crying felt like dying and dying might’ve felt better than crying.

I wonder how many nights of wet pillows and puffy eyes I have endured the past couple of years because of you. Was it me? If I had just loved you a little bit deeper, worked a little bit harder to prove that I deserved you, would we be together today? Maybe if I never expressed how I felt inside, or complained about why you stopped doing the things you used to do, if I just kept quiet and pretended like I was happy, maybe you would’ve stayed. Maybe your attraction is only towards girls who are satisfied with the bare minimum, who would never dream of having a man who loves them unconditionally and with all of his heart, not someone like me who craved the profoundness of real love. Did you think I was like her, like the one who found comfort in someone else? Who made you feel so small and not worth a damn, striped you of your masculinity and yet you stuck by her side? You must’ve thought I was her. And for that I am sorry. Sorry that you were so confused and blind about who I was.

Late nights staring at the walls daydreaming about what could’ve been and what should’ve been, paralyzed by red wine and Advil’s, suppressing all of the mental strain. Sleeping past noon, only waking up to nourish the alcoholic that emerged from this bullshit of a relationship and watching myself go to waste. Dating men who didn’t compare to the version of you I loved so much, who never came close to the lust we had or the connection we shared. And even when I hated you, I somehow always circled my way back to you. Back into your arms, and back into your bed, back to feeling good for the night then waking up angry the next day after realizing yet again, that you were never going to change. That you were never going to love me.

I blamed you. I spent endless nights screaming at you, threads and threads of texts messages cussing you out for hurting me and keeping me tied to you for so long. But in the end, it was my fault for holding on. My wrong doing to myself that led me to the negative space I was in. You tore us apart, but I stuck around for the pain. Too attracted to the misery included with your company, because to me that company was better than not having you at all. So I waited, and waited to see what would become of us. The more I waited, the more heartbroken I became, and the more heartbroken I became, the clearer it was that we had reached our end. That I had reached my breaking point.

And so we go back to being strangers, only coexisting in a city filled with even more strangers. What was it about you that I couldn’t let go of? If I can remember correctly, I was starving and deprived of love, not given one tiny drop to survive off of. I thought I was the one, foolishly believing that you would one day become my husband, and I your wife. I guess my derange idea of what love was played an extensive part in accepting the kind of relationship you were capable of: cold, and distant, with a side of sex.

But now I stare at myself and I don’t feel the same sadness I used to, I don’t question why it’s her and not me, why you could never love me, or why I can’t seem to fall in love with the right person. I look in a new mirror, stand there with my eyes closed and find space in my head so I can say to myself, “You are worth it.”