maybe it’s my fault

Time passes and each time you become a witness to your own wreckage. You’re there for every beginning that looked like something, every ending that felt like proof of something else. The promises. The departures. The moment the door closes and you realize you saw it coming. Do this enough times, and you start keeping score, not to punish yourself, but because numbers make more sense than feelings.

You start to wonder: is this bad luck, or is this a pattern I keep walking into?

And because you are the one common thread running through every story, you start to wonder if the pattern is you.

Maybe it’s me, I think, somewhere around the third or fourth time. Maybe there’s a frequency I give off that only certain people can hear, and it says stay here, I will absorb whatever you bring me, even though it’s pain.

Maybe I mistake intensity for depth. Maybe I confuse being chosen with being safe. Maybe I’ve spent so long learning how to survive love that I never learned how to simply receive it.

I don’t say this to punish myself. I say it because I’m tired of the alternative, this version where I’m simply unlucky, again and again. I don’t want to be a woman who just keeps flipping the coin and getting the bad end.

Maybe it’s my fault for mistaking familiarity for chemistry, for feeling most at home with people who made me work the hardest to be loved, because working hard felt like proof it mattered. Maybe it’s my fault for staying past the first warning, the small thing I explained away because the rest of it felt so good. Maybe I picked people who needed fixing because fixing felt like a task I could control, in a life where so little else was controllable. Maybe my pattern isn’t bad taste. Maybe it’s an old instinct that says love has to be earned through endurance.

So maybe it’s my fault, the parts I can actually reach. The warning signs I can promise myself I won’t argue with next time.

Or maybe none of it is, and I am only doing what humans do after loss, hunting for a better answer, because a world where I had no control is harder to bear than a world where I simply made the wrong decisions.

I don’t know yet which is true. Maybe both are, in different rooms of the same house.

But I’m no longer interested in a story where I am either entirely blameless or entirely to blame. I want the true one, the one where I can look at my own hands in the wreckage and still remember that other hands were there too, and are still answerable for whatever damage they caused.