Look Back
“I don’t think you understand how pathetic you made me feel.”
You need to know that you broke my heart. I don’t care if we’re still in love, if we’re still sharing a bed and a home and a life together. You still broke my heart.
I don’t think you realize quite how much you hurt me, and how it’s changed everything. I understand your need to move on, to forge ahead, to create a path forward – but I can’t. The good things you’ve done and said, the kindness and love, even the gifts you have bought me have all lost so much shine.
I’m sitting here typing this on a laptop you gave me, and I still wonder how much of last year was bullshit. How could it not be, because someone who loved me would not hurt me this much, would not have done this.
You need to understand that when I am in tears, or in one of my rages, and I demand that you “fix it”, I am not ordering. I am begging. If you can make me happy, if you want to see me happy all the time, then fix this, because I don’t know who else can.
I thought you were smart. The basis of my attraction to you was your intellect. But if you were too obtuse to notice something so obvious, something all my friends and your friends could – well. How smart are you, really? Or was it a forced stupidity, because once again you were choosing somebody else?
How else am I to feel, besides this way – like you don’t appreciate or respect me, don’t appreciate or respect our relationship.
I wonder if this is the beginning of the end, really – I fall in and out hard. I dive in, I’ve said this before. But I also dive out, step into the void with barely a second thought and no regard for the pain I will inevitably feel when it all sinks in. I wonder if I am unlearning you already, subconsciously tying my shoelaces and packing my bags. I hope not.
I wonder if it was all worth it. You say it wasn’t, of course it wasn’t you insist. But I need proof, proof you can’t give me because it is impossible to give.
“Was it good for you too?”
It’s hard to remember being happy right now, because this had to happen during one of my episodes. I remember thinking traitorously that I hadn’t been happy in a relationship since early 2010, which is of course nonsense. Little Lion Man made me deliriously happy for the first month or so, and you, you too, had many moments.
Our beginnings were terrible, stuttering like a bad motor, so much shyness and savagery and a studied attempt to look like we did not care. Somewhere along the way things changed, and I’m glad they did, glad we stuck with it. But lately I miss those days more and more – where it felt like I mattered to you more than anything else, where you wanted me to love you as desperately as I wanted you to love me. Where everything said and done was special. Before there was a lack of scarcity and therefore no premium.
But those days are over, and now, right now, I’m feeling hurt and upset and angry and massively screwed over. Some of these emotions are directed at you, some aren’t. But that is how I feel. And I don’t like it.
