i saw you for the first time in a year this week. and for the whole night after, i was so fucking angry. we spoke, and i was screaming inside. my nails were digging crescent moons into my thighs. i kept thinking, why is he talking to me, i don’t want him to talk to me. and i think what left me boiling was that i could tell you knew i didn’t want you there. but you kept going, kept smiling and saying, that’s so great. i’m so happy for you. and i just fucking smiled right back and told you that it was, and that i was having a great time. but you knew. you knew about the cracks under my skin. you knew about the poems. i wonder if this was your kind of vengeance. i’ve written so many times about my hatred of you, about how much i wanted to never see you again, that this is your way of getting back at me for putting our story out there for everyone to see. this is what i get, isn’t it? a cornered conversation where i have to act like the walls aren’t closing in on me, because everyone is watching. the girl with her ex-lover that should have rocked the world. the girl with her abuser that is now making her drown in a crowded room. i wanted to scream at you. i wanted to grab her and tell her everything you’d done to me, and to all the others, but i couldn’t. because she has no part in this. maybe you’ve changed. maybe you treat her the way we should’ve been treated. i hope so, for her sake. at your core, i think that you’ll always be at least a little bit cruel. but she doesn’t know this. she just knows that i’m crazy and overdramatic, obsessive over what you probably told her was just a botched relationship and not a toxic pool that left my skin rotting. but it was you, it was you that did it, that left me so fucked up, it is you that still fucks me up. i don’t know how to separate being civil and hurting myself. i shouldn’t have to feel the walls closing in on me for the sake of being nice. i’m more important than that. i shouldn’t be so afraid to walk away from you. i have the right, after everything. i know that i do.

but i didn’t, and i won’t, because i can’t. because sometimes it’s easier to feel like i’m drowning because for one second, there’s a moment in conversation where we slide back into the way we used to be, and for one second, everything doesn’t feel so fucking disconnected and broken. for one second, i don’t hate being here in this place with you, because it feels how it used to. i take those seconds and run, and i hate to admit it, but i hold them close, because there are times when i don’t think you were really in love with me at all, and i doubt that you ever even gave a shit, but in those few moments, i know that at least part of us was as real as it could have been. part of us wasn’t so completely and utterly fucked from the beginning. it’s strange to cherish those pieces from somebody who ruined me, i know. but i feel like i’m writing about a ghost sometimes. i feel like i’m writing about someone who was never really there, something that never really happened, because it feels too nasty. i wanted to tell you to leave me alone but i also wanted to tell you that i never wanted this. no part of me ever wanted this. and to thank you for giving me something that reminded me that there was something good in you and in us, because i had long since forgotten how that felt. and then i wanted to look at her and i wanted to tell her to run.