this is and isn’t a thank-you letter.

thank you for making me learn to save myself.

thank you for showing me that a powerful love doesn’t always equal a good love.

i am not thanking you for all the shit you did to hurt me.

i am not thanking you for lying and gaslighting and guilt-tripping me.

this is acceptance.

this is growth.

this is the final stitch in a wound that has been open for far too long.

—the good parts

i will not let you be the last one to make me write poems.

i will last.

let me write

not on

you.

i will not let you make me write.

you

will not be the one to

last.

not you.

not you.

not you.

i write poems.

not you.

not you.

not you.

s o

th i s.

i s

the last poem.

to stormy gray,

i have written book after book, poem after poem, line after line about you. to try and make this feel a little bit better, to try and understand what happened to us.

and this is the last time.

i am putting us down. i have to.

writing about you is no longer helping me heal. it is preventing it. it is the anchor that is pulling me to the bottom of the lake. writing about you is not stitching wounds anymore, it is ripping those same wounds open again. and i cannot keep allowing that to happen.

i’ve come to accept that i’m doing more damage to myself than you are, now. i’m becoming my own ghost. i am resurrecting you for no reason other than the fact that i think it may give me some good poems. and of course it does. it always does. but art is no longer an excuse to traumatize myself. it just can’t be.

you are going to be there for the rest of my life. i will always be afraid of seeing you around every corner. and there will be times that i will. i have to live with it. i have to. those moments when we see each other will be some of the scariest moments of my life, and no amount of poetry can stop that from being the case. you will always be one of my greatest fears.

i don’t think, hundreds of poems later, that i understand any better what makes you hurt people the way you do. i don’t understand why i let you destroy me any more than i did when you were ripping me to shreds. i can write a hundred more and it will never make the slightest bit of sense to me.

i think this might just be a goodbye. a part of me will always love you. a part of me will always hate you. and those two halves will go to war every single morning when i wake up, and in every single encounter with you i might have, for the rest of my fucking life. and that’s okay. i hate it, but it’s okay.