what if he loves her the way he refused to love me?
Why didn’t you leave, my mother and my friends and his friends asked me and I wish I could give them all an answer because it’s been months and I’m still not too sure. I can’t really work it out because it’s not like he ever hit me. In fact- maybe it was my fault, the way I swallowed the words that spilled over the floor until I was sick. I carefully clipped admissions of pain into jokes about how love feels like drowning, whispered softly to my friends, “so fucked up” as if this wasn’t the life I was living. I walked around with my jaw clenched because he was safe enough, right? And it’s not like yelling or insults ever killed anyone (it is bad to have this body. it takes up too much space.) I heard someone call me “emotionally delicate” and I would cry but there isn’t really anything to cry about. that’s the joke of it. so what that he said he’d make me do it even if I didn’t want to? so what he’d recoil when I argued and say “you’re so annoying when you panic”. There was nothing beautiful there, nothing soft. No red flags, no warning signs- just an empty carcass and dirt. My heart like a rotten peach (how it is all so unbearable). He has a new girlfriend now and they kiss and hold hands and something inside me breaks (maybe she was soft in ways I never was, maybe it was always me). Is this how love works? Was it always supposed to be this way?
I’m back in a stairwell. blue faced and weak
and weak
and weak.
It isn’t getting easier.