What I Actually Mean When I Say I Hate You

When I say I hate you, what I actually mean, is that I hate the way that these stupid butterflies insist on dancing for you every time you enter my peripheral vision. I hate the way you light up the room, especially when I have become so accustomed to my own personal darkness. I hate the way that you make me laugh even harder than the ones I’ve left behind. I hate the way that you are a combination of the best parts of all of my favorite people, without having ever known any of them.

What I mean is, I hate the way that you give me hope for humanity. I hate the way that you understand me in ways that, for the life of them, some people just never could. I hate the way that you make me want to be a better person and raise my expectations to meet you, while the ones before you insisted that I needed to lower them. I hate the way that you read my mind or the way that we can have conversations by simply looking each other in the eye. I hate the way that your wit and tongue are as quick and sharp as my own, without apology.

I hate the way you see right through me. I hate the way that you roll your eyes and knock over all of my walls with ease as if I haven’t spent over half of my life building them up; Impenetrable monuments of my own trauma, made by stacking all of my unhealthy coping mechanisms on top of each other. I worked damn hard to collect all of these bad habits. The least you could do is pretend to be afraid and run like the rest of them did.

Run,

before you fall in the same way that I already have.

I hate you.

Run before you hate me back.