Lover, you cut at me and then crawl back into my affections. You strike, wound, draw blood to win any victory no matter how petty. You excuse yourself with meaningless jibes about the words I used to mount my inadequate defense, playing with semantics rather than true meaning. Perhaps you are unable to understand emotions, perhaps you simply don’t care, only wanting your hollow “victories.”

You act as if my love was owed to you, but you give me only apathy. When did you last cry because I was hurt, or come running because you thought I needed help? When did you last listen to the song of my heart regardless of the beat or lyrics? When did you last look at me as if I were amazing and dwell with me, hug me, as if it was so sweet you wished you could stay with me forever. When did you last show me the yearnings of your soul, the raw, vulnerable, and beautiful you? Instead you stare at nothing, interact with the meaningless as if it were your holy grail and dismiss anything of importance I have to say – your apathy killed us both. 

I gave to you freely from a sense of deep love, yet you assumed you had taken it from dominance. I saw our relationship as cooperation, yet you saw manipulation instead of helping words, as if we were in some bizarre live game of chess. It broke my heart to realize that you saw a cold war instead of sweet love, for it was all in your head, a paranoia.

All I ever wanted to do was love you and bring happiness, to heal where you were hurt. What I gave, I gave freely from my soul, yet you thought yourself entitled to all I ever had and more. You were as a guest at a restaurant who, because they pay the bill, they feel entitled to be rude to the chef. Yet love is more akin to cooking one another meals for the joy of feeding the other, the coziness that comes from nurturing being the reward. What you saw and felt isn’t love at all; I’m sorry that I failed to teach you, yet it was also your duty to learn.

I should have seen the signs, how you were cold, how you never took the initiative for connecting with touching words or physical love. I should have seen how every good thing you achieved was solely accredited to you, yet all my achievements were also accredited to you. I wish you had learned humility, humbleness and kindness, the happiness that comes from feeling like part of a team, one where each is boosted by the other, proud of the other’s success. Love brings joy to giving, it is the difference between feeling as a valued helping friend or a slave; it’s the magic ingredient that makes everything wonderful. What you showed me was indifference to my pains, refusing my emotional needs, demanding resilience and compliance.

We’ve all got these trauma brains now, brains that developed with less love than we needed, crap food, and violence. We’ve all got these short attention spans and the need to pull people close only to push them away when things get hard. It’s that urge to run, that fear of trust, that uncomfortableness with nurturing love – addicted to the dysfunction and rejecting the cure. 

In this breakup I won’t break; I refuse to because I choose to live again. I choose to love again with full power because anything less would feel anemic. In my pain, I thought you were close to evil, yet in truth, you’re drowning in a sea of your uncried tears. How can a soul be healthy if you refuse to feel your pain? Every time I said sweet things you would say they were “creepy” and I’d die a little more inside. Over the years I forgot what it was to smile from joy instead of painting a smile upon my face for others, one that felt empty and wrong. The truth is, we were simply wrong for each other – you prefer a cold environment and suspect love as a form of manipulation – to you only direct speech with no “sugar coating” is “truth.” Yet in that utilitarian life, a butterfly of the soul dies, for we need the sweet nectar of the flowers and the warm rays of the sun. The sweet words, the laughter, the silliness, and the spontaneous hugs are as needed as the air we breathe. The sad thing is, I think you cold types need it too, that’s why you seek us and cling to our warmth until our fire is extinguished.

You don’t even deserve a thank you but I’m going to give you one anyway. Thank you for almost breaking me. I never understood that line before. It used to sound like permission, albeit retroactive, to hurt someone. I get it now. Only a lover can wound so deep, cut to the very core. That level of trauma has to be an inside job. You were so close to breaking me and watching me bleed. You saw me fail to eat, fail to sleep, and you kept on the pressure with your lies and manipulations, increasing the level of cruelty as you went. After all that, what can there be left underneath but the untouchable part of me, my soul, the girl you can never hurt. I can’t be more raw than that, more exposed, more pure.

– The warmth you lost