—nothing new

i hope i don’t haunt you,

hovering over your shoulder

like a cruel phantom,

reminding you at every turn

of the life we once dreamed about,

the one i let go.

i hope you are living in peace,

free of me and my unreasonable

expectations and hypocrisy,

and i hope one day

you find it in you to forgive me,

if only because that anger

is going to eat you alive

(trust me, i would know).

you’ll be better off

without me, i swear.

let that be the one promise

i don’t break.

i was angry for a long time at so many things

i’ve long lost count of them all.

and there is no point in listing them here anyway,

for you can find them all in my writing, somewhere.

but the one thing i never wrote much about,

not until now, was that the person i am angriest at

is not him, or those who didn’t say anything.

it is myself. i am angry with myself,

though i don’t deserve it.

i have put down the anger that i have held towards him

but have yet to put down the rage i feel towards myself,

about what, exactly, i am not even sure of.

i am angry, maybe, for being angry? i am mad that i sat so long

at the right hand of fury. that i allowed him to take up

so much of me, long after he should have stopped mattering.

that his fingerprints smudge so much of my art.

now that i have no fire left in me to burn him with,

i am scorching my own skin with its remaining embers.

and how cruel is that, to know that this anger has no place

here anymore but to still let it take its time on its way out,

to let it leave brand-new scars atop the ones i had finally

finished healing.

i have always had a knack for falling in love,

not with people as they exist in front of me,

but with my idea of them and what they could become.

and every time, it ends the same way:

i am disappointed, drained of energy

from trying to make somebody into a person

they simply are not, having allowed myself to morph

from girlfriend to mother to therapist and back again,

and they hate me for it, often rightfully so,

because they did not expect such changes

from me, because they feel my love was not true.

and that is what hurts the most, i think,

because i loved them deeply, so much so

that i believed they were capable of greatness,

and is that not love? to push people to become

the best versions of themselves? to experience

growth alongside each other?

but the truth is, that kind of love has its limits,

and often, i don’t know that i’ve pushed too far

until it is too late, until i am faced with the realization

that i was trying to make somebody who was already