Sunday, 7 December 2025
06:33 am
Sometimes I think about how I used to laugh back then. It was a laugh with an air of ignorant carelessness to it.
Fucking insufferable.
1:14 pm
My ability to waste time and procrastinate is something to be marvelled at, really. I opened my laptop to write at 10am and since then I’ve made a coffee, a matcha, a boiled egg with soldiers and asparagus, a freshly baked croissant, built two shoe racks and organised fifty or so pairs of shoes on said shoe racks, arranged by colour, shoe type and frequency of wear.
I don’t know what’s been wrong with me. I’ve just found writing really difficult. I can’t seem to lock in. It’s very irritating. My brain is all scattered. Perhaps it’s because I finally feel contented.
I don’t trust that for a second.
Well... I do and I don’t. I don’t know if I’m any more okay with him being gone. I think I’ve just learned to manage it better. Like… I think of him just as much. It just no longer paralyses me or feels like I’m about to throw up my own heart—at least not every single time.
It won’t stop raining today. It’s put a little dent in my plans, I must admit. I desperately need to go to the pharmacy to pick up my medication, and I also need to swing by Boots, Waitrose and M&S if possible. I’m almost deathly afraid of rain when I don’t absolutely have to go out in it. If I’ve got solid plans, it’s barely a bother if I have an umbrella and a scarf around my hair, but on a slow morning like today, the thought of going outside is quite ghastly.
I really don’t quite know what’s wrong with me. My ability to conjure up beautiful prose out of my own chaos is fantastic but as it stands, there is no chaos and I cannot will myself to write a single thing. There’s this huge block.
Monday, 8 December 2025
08:27 am
Write. Don’t think. Just write.
OKAY.
Seven months ago I broke up with The Last Man I Ever Loved in My Twenties. I spent approximately five of those months crying myself to sleep most nights, wishing I’d kept my fucking mouth closed and endured the growing list of increasingly unbearable truths that finally made me break things off.
But that feeling faded. The pain is still there—the nagging reminders of everything he failed to be for me and the ache of missing a part of myself, along with that sense of belonging that I’ve craved since birth. But I’ve learned to manage that pain differently. It’s still with me, sure. But now I am beside it. I am above it, looking down at it. I am managing it as an objective thing that just kind of lives inside me and might always be a part of me.
So why am I talking about all of this again? Great fucking question, darling. Well... now that I’m truly single and completely without romantic obsession for the first time since my prepubescent years, I find myself looking back at my former self with the same feeling I have when I remember the version of me that drank and did cocaine most nights.
Thinking: you poor fucking thing.
I think of myself two days deep into a bender, swaying in a stranger’s kitchen muttering to myself “this is the best feeling ever… I never want to come down” and then the party would inevitably come to an end and I would wake up the following morning filled with shame and dread.
I stayed in that bubble for a long time, repeating the cycles, thinking I was having fun when I was an embarrassment, a mess and a fucking loser.
Whenever I think about drinking, that’s the image that flashes in my head: a woman wasting her days swaying in a stranger’s kitchen, surrounded by people who don’t really care about her. Alone. A waste of potential.
For me, being in love is like that. I think everything is great at the time. But I become enslaved by it. Love is one hell of a fucking drug and it has always been my real drug of choice. Everything else is child’s play.
And when I think of myself in love, I see a woman curled on a filthy mattress she believes is a cloud, needle in arm, letting her life fall to pieces so she can get her fix.
I scream at her:
GET UP OFF THE FUCKING FLOOR. Look what’s over here, waiting for you! YOU DON’T NEED THAT. STOP IT. IT’S KILLING YOU. You won’t survive this.
She doesn’t hear me most of the time, but one day, back in May, she did. And then the next day, and the next. And then on the morning of the third day, I left Mr Man.
Because I couldn’t get the image out of my head: the woman who both is and isn’t me rattling around a kitchen, man nowhere to be found, reaching for hidden pill bottles and staying for the children.
Swaying. Kitchen. Alone. Waste of potential.
And then I walked right up to that woman and I smacked her across the face. Hard. I screamed. She listened. And now, here we are.
And still, I find myself wincing with pain when I think of him. And then, like I said, I sidestep that pain. I rise above it. I put it in a box and hide it away in a drawer with all the other versions of myself I’m too scared to look at.
I guess the question that remains is: if I could, would I go back and stay on the cloud, hooked up to the heroin? Sometimes (more often now than before) the answer is no. But I find myself doubled over in pain when I think too hard about it. About him, I mean. Or about us.
There is this kind of tragic beauty in completely unravelling and losing yourself like that in love. It’s all well and good looking at an addict and reducing them to a ‘junkie’—looking down from your high horse, pitying them. All the while they’re floating away on a cloud somewhere else. Away from the dirt and the bruises and whatever led them there, to that moment.
But sometimes I just want to be back there, blissful in my ignorance. It was easier then. And I was happy, wasn’t I? And I miss his laugh. And I miss mine too—the way it used to be—that ignorant, careless fucking laugh and I—
The hand reaches out from future me and smacks me across the face. Hard.
6:05 pm
I need to get up and out. I just cried. I’d been holding it in all the way home—deep breathing and heavy sighing until I reached my front door. I picked up the pile of envelopes left on the doormat and shuffled through them to separate my own mail from the rest. My heart stopped when I found a small brown envelope with my name and address handwritten on the front.
I tore it open as I climbed the first flight of stairs two at a time and my stomach flipped when I saw cursive handwriting on thick white card beneath the envelope.
A note.
The disappointment flooded my lungs when I saw it was just a note from a brand thanking me for collaborating with them.
Of course he hasn’t sent you a handwritten fucking note. Why on earth would he send you fucking anything?! He wants nothing to do with you. He would like to erase you. In fact… why don’t you make it easier for everyone and just erase yourself you stupid, pathetic, fucked up, tiresome little woman.
And that’s when I cried, right there in the middle of the stairwell, facing the wall and hoping the automated lights didn’t turn off and leave me standing motionless in the dark.
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
08:43 am
Shortly after I wrote the above, I fell to the floor of my bedroom and broke down again while trying to get ready for an event. Before that, I was in the mirror sticking hairpins into my chignon and Pickle (my sister) was asking me what was up.
I burst out into a full blown rant: “FUCK. THAT. MOTHER. FUCKING. CUNTING. ASS. HOLE. AHHHHHHHHHHHH”
She was laughing at me from the living room. Honestly, it felt good to let it out. I enjoyed having an audience to play up to so I didn’t feel so insane, alone in my room, screaming at the person who had long since walked out of my life.
*He full on sprinted, dear.
I was initially excited to go to the event. It was a cute pyjama party and the cinema. But my hair looked off and the skin on my eyelids has become dry, sensitive and red all of a sudden, and my sister was rushing me and so I snapped at her “just go without me.”
I hate being rushed.
Deep breath. Compose.
“I will arrive in my own time, feeling good, or not at all,” I said flatly as I buffed bright blusher into my grey complexion.
Ugly. Bitch. Incompetent. Fat. Boney. Lazy. Pathetic. UGLY. UGLY. UGLY. CRAZY. CRAZY. CRAZY.
I decided a few seconds after this that I would no longer be attending. No way.
“Go without me. I’m not going,” I said, tearing the hair grips from my scalp like they’d personally offended me.
She must’ve felt the sternness in my voice because she didn’t push back. She just replied “OK” sweetly as she gathered her things to leave.
I felt bad letting her go alone. It was supposed to be fun. Something to do together. Sister night. But I wasn’t going to be fun to be around.
I wasn’t going to have fun. I was going to cry.
Once I heard the front door close, I slumped onto my bedroom floor and waited a few seconds until my sister was out of earshot before letting out a guttural scream that turned over soil in the tightest corners of my body. And then I let out one more for good measure.
After a few seconds I looked at myself in the mirror, scraped my hair back into a tight bun, stood up, snatched back my shoulders, went to the bathroom to wash off my makeup and then I made my way to the sofa while laughing at my own ridiculousness.
Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy
My period came an hour later.
Thursday, 11 December 2025
03:24 am
I don’t understand how that man still plagues every corner of my mind. Every one of my waking moments. And then more while I dream. I can’t escape. Not even in slumber.
This time of the month, it’s ramped up to 100 and I feel like I’m back at day one trying to bargain with a god I don’t believe in to turn back time. Because right now I would give almost anything to do it all again.
I relive the day we met over and over in my mind. I wouldn’t change a single thing. Because it was perfect. The highest high. And the six months that followed were too.
And then it wasn’t. But I can’t stop myself trying to relive it and rewrite it. We exist in reveries while I stare aimlessly out of windows.
Again. Again. Again. Again.
I’m trying to distract myself. I’m trying to ‘move on’. But for the first time ever, I think I’m incapable of falling in love.
In the end, the most integral part of my being was extinguished with him. It just wasn’t the part I’d suspected.
A lover girl who doesn’t know how to love? Whatever will you do with yourself now?
I think I could perhaps find myself a plaything to keep my mind occupied. Someone pretty and just toxic enough to raise my heart rate a little. I’d just like to sweat over someone that isn’t him.
But everyone repulses me and then I hate myself for even wanting it and I can’t fathom the thought of letting someone else near me ever again. And then I wonder if he’s moving on with other women and I retch and I taste vomit and I want to claw out my own fucking eyeballs.
I want to lock myself in the box and put myself in the drawer next to all the other useless versions of myself and—
My god, I can’t wait for this period to end.
See you next time in the confessional.
Blithe x
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