There’s an ache in my heart that this love doesn’t fix.

People say that obsession feels like scratching an itch, but I think it’s closer to digging something out of your own skin. You see the line you’re about to cross and the blood you’re about to spill, but you keep going. And soon after you realize you’ve made everything worse, but can you really say you had any other choice?

If I could let go of these feelings, I would. Some days I feel like I am making progress. I wake up having dreamed about someone else, in warm arms that are not his, and I think I am living the life I was supposed to have. And other days I am overcome with panic that I lost something I’ll never get back, or maybe never had in the first place.

After three years I was abandoned on impulse: a response to one bad day in a string of really good days. And a few months later I was left again: a friend I’d had for years (and hoped I’d know forever) found it easier to push me away than to vocalize her own discomfort before it became unbearable. I still can’t process either. Half a year gone, and every morning I still wake up to a world that seems fundamentally different from the way I understood it to be. Each day I go on, wearing my masks to interact with people I now suspect I will never be able to truly know. And under the shell I show everyone, it just hurts.

I feel myself starting to push away the people that are still around. I don’t trust that they’ll stay, and I’m not sure I care. I’m in the habit of performing loving motions, but I sometimes wonder if they are only habits: the ashes of a fire that’s long gone, which originally burned for someone else. I’m surprised how little I have to say these days. I used to consider myself so analytical, and now I just don’t think about things so much.

Recently he asked, “Do you love me?” and said, “After all these months I’m still not sure if you’d leave me to go back to him if he asked you.” I wondered if I paused too long before I responded. I care for him deeply, and he doesn’t ask me to specify how so I am able to confirm it. He deserves my love; all the qualities and characteristics are right there on the balance sheet and I see the payment I owe. I don’t want to hurt him, and I don’t want to hurt myself by losing him and regretting it later. I know that’s not good enough for forever, but maybe I can play along until something real happens. Some days I even fool myself.

The second comment needed addressing too. I don’t lie to him, and I never have: he knows everything. And yet, I have softened things over time, mimicking the way I imagine they would naturally have evolved if my feelings had changed. So I talk less about the anger, and the sadness, and the dramatic actions I still consider. I dig into my skin in private moments and wash off the blood before anyone sees. And occasionally, when things are really bad, I confess to having scratched the itch. I just pretend that it’s a healing scar. I don’t let on that it’s still bleeding, that it’s probably getting worse.

It’s probably infected; I just can’t leave it alone.

When I think, it hurts. When I feel, it hurts.

“He won’t ask.”

I wanted to be better. I wanted to be interesting. You know, before. And I felt like I was learning and growing and developing as a human.

Now I define myself by running slowly. And cooking so I can eat more than I need. And I drink. I’m drinking too much.

It’s not even a question of whether it’s too much because I know it is. There’s this tightness in my chest that I felt before when I was stressed out daily at work. It’s been over six years since I’ve felt like that. I feel a milder version of it all the time now, unless I’m working alone. It’s not from work because work is going as well as I could ever expect it to. Writing code is an escape for ten hours of the day, where time passes and I don’t notice it.

Alcohol helps pass the rest of the time.

You know when you ask someone else if they’ve done something and they give some bullshit answer like, ”Not that I can remember?” I get that now. It’s a way to avoid lying. There are nights I can’t remember. I find clues on my body I use to infer things, but they don’t fully account for the gaps in my memory.

I was so scared about what my life would look like if I went down this path, so I stayed off it as long as I could. But I’m here, and it’s fine. I don’t have to think about anything. I don’t have to worry about the future because I have the faith that everything will be just fine. That faith that comes from the indifference of not caring about outcomes anymore.

No friends, no family, no responsibilities save an angry cat to take care of, but this is a slow spiral. I’m sure I’ll outlast him and in the meantime I can give him the love I have left, which is lovely. There’s still extra for now but the flow will slow to a trickle soon.

For now the leftover curdles, and it fuels the fire. It makes me hungry and thirsty. It makes me feel unpleasant things. It squeezes my chest.

I’m not getting better anymore. I’m boring as shit. I don’t want things from people. Before I wanted to be cared about by someone I cared about, who would listen to what I wanted to say and told me some things I liked hearing. Too much to ask from family, too much to ask from friends.

But wine? Rum? My expectations are always exceeded.

Maybe I’m not better, but this is. Everything is just fine.

“We both always thought you could do better.”
“He always seemed like he was going to start being really whiny.”
“Everything I have seen from him just makes him seem pretty pathetic.”
“I don’t really get what you see in him, but I do think he’d make a good dad.”

Nah, he wouldn’t make a good dad. Good fathers don’t need to be fathers in order to be good people. They’re able to see when someone is weak and needs them to be strong. They don’t make excuses and blame other people for their own shit. They don’t let people down who depend on them, who they encouraged to trust them.

I still remember how disappointed my therapist looked after she met him. Like, you’ve gone through all this bullshit...for this asshole? WHY?

But ultimately I guess weak people deserve pity, not hate. They hate themselves enough, after all.

Now I get to decide who I am. For other people, I can be strong. But who am I for me? Can I be strong for myself too?

It’s a hard question to ask, because I don’t need to. If I fall apart, it doesn’t matter to anyone but me. And with that in mind, I can be as short-sighted as I feel like being. I’m free. And maybe everyone who’s ever abandoned me has gotten it right. Whether I’m awful or they are inadequate, or both, doesn’t really matter in the end. This is my life now — only mine. I can do whatever I want, and what I want is to stop thinking about all this. And I know I’ll stop thinking about it: a few hours at a time, and then forever. A permanent solution to a permanent set of problems.

To me, saying “I love you,” means “You will always have a place in my life.” And I’ve been hesitant to say it, because of the commitment inherent in that “always.” I’ve been even more wary of believing it from someone else. Time and time again I’ve seen that sadly few others share my meaning. With friends, family, and relationship partners, in most cases their expressed love for me has been only temporary, but mine for them has remained over time. While today varied circumstances lead me to imagine that it’s unlikely that anyone from my past will come back to me for an ear or a favor, they can. I have so few constants in my life that I don’t want to believe that every goodbye is a goodbye forever. And yet, for most people who’ve been a part of my life, it seems they are one and the same.

Today I came across a connection neither of us has broken yet, and I spent time reading our banter and reliving our conversations there. And I thought, how sad, for us to have loved each other so much and for it to have come to this. You read what I say here, but continue to avoid any genuine communication. I have felt so much pain, and have no reason to believe that you care about any of it. My treatment now, my treatment then: the evidence is there that despite your repeated claims to the contrary, of the two of us, you are the one who just didn’t care enough.

And then it occurred to me, that for things to have come to this, you could never have loved me, not really. Not the way I imagine love works anyway, and have experienced from the very few people in my life who have come into it and stayed. While I can count those people on one hand: an uncle, a high school friend, an ex, a one-time date, there are people who have stuck around and while they say it or not, I know that their feelings are real because their actions reflect them. They understand that while most people have parents and siblings and others they know will always be in their lives, I can’t depend on any of those because I don’t have them. I am alone. I have been alone for a long time. I still reel from the trauma of abandonment from immediate family, and I will always fear it from people with whom I share even more tenuous ties.

I hope you understand now that I was right to be afraid of that treatment from you. I so often asked, “Do you love me today?” because all along, I believed the answer was no. I was waiting for the day you finally agreed with me, and no longer believed it either. Eventually, that day came. Being right never hurt so much.

The consolation prize I am left with now is an awareness of my own capacity for love. To have felt so much, inspired by so little, is a testament to how much I have to give to others, when I let myself. And as I experience those feelings again, it will be with fewer reservations and fewer doubts about what I have to offer. It will be with someone who understands that while romantic feelings can always fade, “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”¹ I am capable of bearing that responsibility, and ultimately need someone who has the capacity for the same.

To disregard the normal, vulnerable human emotions of someone one has claimed to love is the ultimate cruelty. An incompatibility in romantic or sexual involvement should not result in treating another person like trash: as unworthy of consideration, of regard, of explanation. To do so is to exhibit a fundamental dishonesty and untrustworthiness, and it is unforgivable.

And yet — if you cried out to me, I would hear you. I would give you that, because my love for you was a promise, not a lie. I have been so angry, so fundamentally betrayed, because it’s clear that the same isn’t true for you. My time with you has wrung me out and sucked me nearly dry, and I have no one to blame but myself for letting it happen. But my mistake was not in loving, or even loving too much, but in choosing the wrong person in whom to invest my feelings.

The act of love is a partnership. It is a commitment. It’s staying when you want to go. It’s honoring past assurances, even when doing so is an act of mourning. It’s expressing regret for the promises that can no longer be kept, and were mistakenly made in the first place.

I wasn’t loved, but I did love. And because of that, I can forgive myself for the mistakes I made. I can believe I’m worthy of trying again, with someone stronger this time around.

All is not lost. The only thing I lost was you.

¹ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince