“Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” – Euripides
Dear Brian,
So, I lied.
I can’t wait forever for you. You never choose me, so I’m going to. I can only hope that someday you will come around, but I’m not gonna be waiting forever. Whatever happens is gonna happen, because I am amazing and erratic and spontaneous and passionate and too much for most people. But my person won’t make me change any of that for them. My person won’t make me feel guilty for needing constant reassurance and daily consistent communication. They will just do it because they love me.
I thought you were going to be different. I thought you were strong enough to support the kind of person I am. But I think I was delusional (still am, but oh well).
You seem to need validation. You seem to be searching for it from behind a screen. With your past, I can understand the appeal. I am terribly sorry for what life has done to you. You never deserved any of it. You go to therapy. You try. But you hurt people. And you don’t fix it. You don’t apologize and make it better. You ignore it and let it fester and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I’ve done that before. I’m being drug back to that place. I cannot survive in that place.
Every person who says they love me hurts me. I knew better than to let someone in. I told myself I wouldn’t get caught up. Fuckboys only. No emotions.
But.
You dazzled me. You still do. The thought of cutting you out is excruciating. But it’s time. You stabbed me in the back, and I’ve been bleeding out for weeks, begging the stars that you would see what you did and fix it. You knew this. I’ve been melting down on social media for weeks. If you didn’t see it, you never felt anything for me, and these words are wasted.
Your inaction is action.
Maybe when things were hot and passionate and exciting, maybe you meant what you said. I like to believe you did, but I trust too easily when I get caught up. That’s why I wasn’t gonna do it.
When we first matched, you were gorgeous to me in a way that hurt. An attractive writer who loves Dr. Who and food and can carry a conversation and who never forced unsolicited bathroom dick pics down my feed and who was respectful and I felt an instant connection with? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I thought I’d hit the proverbial jackpot. If only you could see how amazing you are in my eyes.
I thought you would survive the hump. The invisible barrier between me and other people. Everyone has one, and they all look different. My therapist and I had discussed it at length. I thought if I talked it through on my end, you’d survive. I didn’t know you had your own, or that your exterior fortress, when activated, is something I’ve never encountered, and I have no way of knowing how to get in. I’ve tried everything that should work. You said you were a puzzle, and I’ve been desperately trying to figure you out. But I think you pulled pieces and sabotaged the table before I ever sat down to try to put it together.
I let myself be vulnerable with you, and you did the same. I saw you. But you’ve always kept me at arm’s length with one hand while pushing and pulling me with the other. We both deserve better than that. We deserve the kind of love we talked about giving each other. We talked about being the partners each of us wanted. You just didn’t want it with me. Or you let yourself get in the way. Either way, you control how you behave. It was never my business to tell you what to do. But I taught you how to love me, and you’ve demonstrated that was never your intention.
But God, we could have been epic. Life-changing. Satisfying in a way that feels criminal.
Eventually, I’ll find it. I’ll find someone who is okay with both of us being messed up feral little gremlins together.
I’ll always wish it were you. You know, I didn’t set out to love you. I almost deleted you the first time you disappeared. I almost ghosted you in the beginning, too. I actually deleted Facebook for almost a week while you were still a chat thread in my Facebook Dating feed. We’d barely talked. Our conversation seemed to be sputtering. When I came back, you were still there. Then, we started talking about food, and you came alive.
Something about you clicked for me. I wanted you. Bad. More than I’ve ever wanted anything in my whole life. You were perfect for me. Broken but trying to be better. Putting in the hard work on yourself. Showing up every day, even though the world around you was a dumpster fire. Trying to make meaning and purpose out of a life that was obliterated by people who were supposed to love you. I thought we were similar in ways I’d never encountered. I felt safe to tell you the dirtiest parts of myself. The things I never told anyone. You didn’t treat me like I was an abomination for them. You loved them. You talked to my demons and made them feel wanted. You made them feel seen.
But that’s why I tolerated the ghosting, the inconsistency, the games about where you’d been. It didn’t matter as long as you came back.
And then you left. No goodbye. No, “this isn’t working”. Just gone. You just stopped talking to me. And now, I can’t talk to anyone else without making an absolute mess of things. It sucks that I’m left with a million things to say and no void to scream them into.
Since your silence continues, I’m gonna share this with my world. It’s only about a dozen people, and most of them are my family. But, like always, I suspect that even though you aren’t talking, you are watching and reading.
For the record, I never cared about your past. I only cared that you weren’t the monster you appear to be. Your word was good enough. But that’s my red flag to deal with. (I’ve got lots of them, but they are emotional support flags, and I can’t part with any of them.)
I only cared about building a future. I wanted to understand your past so we could grow together. Silly me. I just wanted to be friends with your inner child and hold them and tell them they were special and deserved love. Someday, you will let someone do that.
I thought you were the Jack to my Sally. The Joker to my Harley Quinn. Instead, you are Jean Grey, and I’ll always be Wolverine, a feral monster watching from the corners, being snarky and mean to everyone around me about it, and never moving on from this place. I would kill for adamantium claws right now so I could really destroy the world around me instead of only doing it in my mind.
Cathy Marie Bown 