An Open Letter To The Man Who Obliterated Me

It was a Sunday afternoon, I distinctly remember, when you asked how someone as wonderful as I could love someone as average and strange as you. You asked me with a quiet purpose, my head lodged firmly between your arm and the slope of your neck. You murmured that you didn’t deserve someone like me. But then, why a year later am I learning how to mend together the skeletal fragments that lie like puzzle pieces in between my sheets?

There is a difference between love and loneliness, and I had learned the lesson with someone who came long before you, who used me until I was nothing but blood and skin. I warned you that the woman you saw before you was nothing but a scared little girl with shadows of loss dancing behind her eyes. You convinced me with idealistic soliloquies, of your gallant rescuing and safeguarding, but really the only person you were protecting was yourself. There is nothing poetic anymore in the promises you made to treasure me, spending the rest of your life showing me how much you loved me. I have every night with tears asphyxiating the oxygen from my lungs from reading your declarations and apologies while remembering those same hands and lips found comfort in the arms of another person. There is nothing apologetic about betrayal, and I cannot seem to fabricate enough reasons as to how I was not enough for you to love, even though you kept echoing lines of ‘you are my person’ and ‘I am living only half of a whole’.

You told me I was the strongest, most beautiful person you had ever met and truly loved; yet you reduced me to someone so unrecognisably weak I couldn’t identify my gaunt eyes staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. I believed that loving you unconditionally was enough to match the dedication you draped around my shoulders in comfort. But nothing prepared me for the love of my life to forget me enough to fill his hands with her imaginary flesh and his mouth with the dirty things she wanted him to do to her. I wonder if you ever thought about me, but how could you when you were lying on your bed across the world with one hand wrapped around your shaft and the other holding your phone to watch her climax.

Tonight, I will wrap my legs around a stranger’s torso like you wrapped your dishonesty around my neck like a noose, and I will watch the waves like foaming forests wash away the future we built together; in this straw house that kept the remnants of my heart beating. I am preparing myself to watch this stranger scavenge my body and leave marks, erasing any trace that you were ever there to begin with; just as I had prepared myself to self-destruct watching your mistress touch herself for you as you requested. All I seem to be doing is trying to convince myself that somewhere between your lies and false remorse is hope for us. That there is fight in you that wants to keep us going. But we know dreams never come true and the reality is that walking away is your sanctimonious decision to leave me paralyzed in my heartache.

I’m afraid to be alone in this asylum at night, when walls trap me in isolation with my thoughts. I am telling myself that I am enough, more than enough for anyone and you are the one who deserved to be left with nothing but your silence, but I am the one watching as photos of your smile and satisfaction fill the screen of my laptop this late in the evening.