I remember wishing I could just turn it off. That feeling of knowing I needed more. Knowing it couldn’t go on like this forever. I could smell the rot and it was only getting worse.
Loving him was perfect at first. Because it always is, isn’t it. Everything was so fucking perfect until I’m less than a year in and the balance on the scales has tipped so far in his favour, I had somehow gone from being treated like a princess to being treated like a fan.
How it happened, I don’t know. I’m still performing a nightly autopsy on the relationship to figure out the exact time of death. I can never quite figure it out.
I remember thinking, a better woman than me would’ve left already.
It’s important to note that I wasn’t being treated like dirt. He was polite and sweet and kind in all the ways a man should be. If his mother ever reads this, she can sleep soundly at night knowing her son was always a gentleman.
But I’m worth more than politeness. Every action has an equal opposite reaction. Yet, the energy I was putting in wasn’t coming back to me.
He had become my everything and yet I felt invisible.
I know how it feels to be loved properly. I know how it feels when someone makes you the centre of their universe. He did once. Until he didn’t.
I was a useless thing in his life. Replaceable. Mundane. Not quite right.
I’ve been on both sides of the coin. I’ve been him before. I’ve stayed in things that were dead for me. I’ve been the villain in someone else’s story. More than once. I could feel their love pouring out for me and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t ignite the same spark I once felt for them. I knew the scales were tipped in my favour. They knew it too. Everybody knew it.
Maybe this relationship was my karma. A way to restore the ways of the world. I like to think it is. It has to have been some kind of lesson or carry some karmic meaning. It would be too depressing otherwise, knowing this pain was all for nothing.
So what happened to me after I decided to leave?
Agony. Still, nine months on. Agony. I think about him all the time.
But I feel peace. My pride is intact. I knew I was worth more than begging for scraps like a stray dog at his feet.
There are no villains in this story. The people who love me might dispute this detail but it’s the way I’d like to remember it.
Loving him was tender and pure and childish and I don’t really want to remember it any other way. He wasn’t unkind. He was unwilling.
Knowing my worth is knowing that I deserve a text back from my own boyfriend. Knowing I deserve to be seen. Knowing that my person wouldn’t let me feel that pit in my stomach that made a home there when he stopped looking at me.
Knowing my worth was leaving someone I loved because they didn’t want to see me.
Ouch. I don’t want to tell this story again. I’d like to tell another story. about a man who makes me feel shiny. But this is the only one I have for now. I’m sorry. And It’s drenched in lessons I thought I’d learned years ago.
I romanticised the bare minimum again and now I’m paying the ultimate price.
That’s what happens when you go on sale. Nine months of ongoing torture mourning an eleven month relationship and I’m not even close to the end of my sentence.
Just be grateful you left when you did.
And I am grateful, by the way. For all of it. I loved loving him. And still I’m grateful I found the strength to leave when I did. I was looking out for a version of me in the future who will thank me one day.
I’m still waiting for her to arrive. I think she’s taking the scenic route.
I’m not sure I’ll love anyone with that same intensity again. If I’m honest, I hope I don’t. It’s the kind of intensity that only happens when everyone in the room knows you love them just a little bit more than they love you. It’s a yearning for something you already have but can’t quite grasp. And it only grows. The rot.
Never again.
Sometimes I question my own sanity and I trick myself into thinking I was asking for too much.
And then I remember the feeling of being locked outside of my own relationship, banging on the door to be let in. That was real. I felt it.
I longed to be on the inside, knowing we’re the ones in cahoots. Co-conspirators. A team.
I know what it feels like to be loved the way you’re supposed to. To be loved by someone who would have done anything for me. Taken a bullet for me. And to know it isn’t even a question.
I’ve seen it and I’ve felt it and I’ve lived it.
And if it’s not like that, then keep it. I don’t want it.
See you next time in the confessional.
Blithe x
I wrote this a few weeks before I left:
I Am Not the Thing
by Blithe Saxon
You hold me like a keyring,
old, beautiful, mostly forgotten.
I am not the thing. I am not the key. I am not the door.
I’m just something you jangle when you’re nervous.
Something you keep because throwing me away would feel like bad luck.
I want to be the door.
I want to be the door.
I want to be the house and the reason you come home
and the thing you press your back against when you need to feel safe.
I want to be the storm shelter.
I want to be the goddamn floor-plan of your life.
But you pick me up like an afterthought.
Like: oh, yeah. Her. She’s nice.
Like I’m a souvenir from a trip you don’t talk about anymore.
Like I’m good to have. Like I’m fine.
I don’t want to be fine.
I want to be everything.
The centrepiece. The spark. The thing that sets the whole table on fire.
I want to be the first thing you see when you open your eyes,
and the last name you whisper before you fall asleep,
and every breath in between.
I want to be picked.
I want to be picked.
I want to be picked.
And not like a flower.
Not delicate, not temporary.
Like a choice.
Like a vow.
Like a fuck-you to anyone who ever made me feel replaceable.
Pick me like a fight. Pick me like a fruit you’re not supposed to touch.
Pick me and ruin everything.
I want to be the map you forgot how to fold.
I want to be the house burning down while you stand there holding the match,
whispering, look what we made.
You say love isn’t about superlatives
but I’ve seen the way you look at the stars.
Don’t lie to me. You want wonder.
So why not me?
Why not me?
I want to be the reason you don’t sleep.
I want to be too much.
I want to be just enough for someone who wants everything.
But you just keep the key.
And the door never opens.
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