I hate myself for still dwelling on the past
on a past that is so humiliating,
a past that Iwas able to leave behind.
my life is good, I am happy and in love and, most days, I feel tremendously alive-
-as in the birds chirping make my heart burst of joy and I feel ready to take on the world as I was promised.
but, when the sun goes down and I am alone in my room, and there are no other sounds besides my own beating heart,
I remember the way he left
such a hurry in his steps
such a fear in his voice.
he said he had someone else while keeping me behind the curtains
said that he loved me and he was scared of losing me
but didn´t he know that the lie would tear me apart?
that treating me as a second option would make me feel like someone´s leftovers?
I wouldn´t have done it if i knew it. i wouldn´t have entertained him and talked every day, believing I was in love, if I had known he had someone else already loving him
but haven´t I gotten the right to love him, by then? I was there first, wasn´t I?
Nowadays, nothing seems certain. I was probably not the first to fertilize his dry soil. But I was the first to make it hospitable. I prepared him for the next one, and was treated as scum.
Nowadays, I think what makes me the angriest was the fact that I didn´t trust my instincts. I knew something was happening, but trusted him far too much, believed he would be gentle with my heart and tell me when I wasn´t the owner of it anymore — like he was of mine
The day he told me, I could barely walk. My heart shattered in a million pieces on the hard wood floor of my apartment and my dogs kept looking at me, wondering what was wrong.
He was wrong. And what we had had was a mistake. The love I had for him was wrong.
How could he humiliate me so? Demanding my friendship and my kindness as if he deserved it by lying to me and making me the mistress.
I usually move on quickly from my failed loves. But maybe what really hurts me is that I didn´t have control over the narrative: all of my past relationships, I was the one to break it off, to decide it was better for me and my partner to part ways. And, to be honest, I´ve always been right. Everyone was able to move on and find better people, better alternates. Maybe that´s what hurts: the lack of trust in my own judgment because I was so blindly in love.
And I know, today, that it wouldn´t have worked. I am sure I would´ve gotten bored of his ways, of how I was with him — it just sucks tremendously that I didn´t get to live through the disappointment. Instead, I was replaced, and disrespected in the process.
Why couldn´t I defend myself? Why couldn´t I curse his name to the skies, curse him with my witchcraft? Why couldn´t I hate him, instead of demeaning myself to his fake friendship until one of us had to quit?
He even had the guts to tell me that, since the first day, he had thought I was too much of a woman for him. He knew I was too great for him. But is that the way you treat someone who´s supposedly so great?
Now I know my fucking value, and I do know that I am a goddess compared to the sad, little man I unfortunately made the mistake of falling in love with. Now, I don´t miss what we could´ve been (and I don´t miss it for years, since I´ve found something bigger and better) — I do miss my dignity, and my power. He took it away by hiding himself to me. And I let him take it because I had been fooled by a mediocre man.
I hate the way I was treated. I hate that I feel like I was fetishized, considering the next girl is similar to me. I wondered if he thought of that. I wondered if he thinks about me sometimes, if he regrets breaking my heart like that. If he misses what he lost in me — not a lover, not a girlfriend, but a woman that would´ve been a loyal friend, had he only been honest.
There were so many chances for him to open up. There were so many chances for me to speak up. What happened? What happened inbetween those chances?
And why does it still hurt when I think about it?
I remember walking on the beach, crying for the loss of a great love. And I know, today, what an actual great love is. It´s support, respect, friendship and passion. We only ever had the passion, and still I believed it was one of my greatest love stories.
I convince myself he´s only a hurtful chapter, but he lingers on the space between the lines, reminding me I wasn´t worth it. I wasn´t worth the truth, or any piece of respect. I am just someone people surround until I am no longer a reflection of your deepest desires. As soon as it became real, I became useless to him.
Because of his disrespect, I have to live with the constant thought of being disposable, even years after that. To this day, I wonder if I am enough to my current partner, if I´m just a fetish. “Am I something you´ll leave behind when you realize I´m too much?”, I think of asking when I look at him. But I know I am not too much. I am everything. And it´s not on me if someone couldn´t handle it.
I wish I could say all this to him now. I wish I could make him hurt as much as he did me. I wish he knew what his effect was, even though I also don´t want him to know that he had this effect. The truth is, this path has been treacherous and the pain comes and goes sometimes. Most times, I am perfectly fine. But I still feel the burn and the rage if I listen to a song that reminds me of what we had.
I hope that, one day, I can get past it. I hope that I can understand that my dignity hasn´t been tarnished — but his life might have been because of losing me.
