I think about you despite myself. On the drive to work or when I'm having coffee with friends, your face appears suddenly in my mind, wearing that smirk you seemed to reserve only for me to make me feel small or stupid, and I hear you say something condescending or spiteful. And I hate you. Actively hate you. It isn't just a passing thought; my entire body rejects you, my stomach forms knots, rage burns through my veins and my heart begins to race.
Fight or flight, remember? Because I chose flight, every time I came into battle with you. My mind couldn't take the battering; I wasn't sure which part of me you were getting ready to cut in half this time. I wasn't sure if you were taking my self-esteem or my confidence, my self-belief, my voice.
I wasn't sure how much I had left.
And your face, it does this thing where it catapults me back into every one of those arguments. Every time I screamed at you and you stared back at me coolly as if I hadn't just found out you had lied to me once again. I remember every time I locked myself in the bathroom and you came hammering on the door behind me. I remember the cold of the tiles on my skin as I sobbed, too terrified to open it. I remember wanting the ground to swallow me whole. I remember thinking hell would be better than this.
And I hate you. And I want to tell the world who you really are behind that mask you wear so well for everyone other than the person you're supposed to love. But you don't know how to love, do you?
And I hate you all over again.
But you don't deserve my anger, my hatred, my spinning thoughts. You don't deserve the power of paralysing me every time I see those blue eyes I once believed held the promise of forever but were actually dead behind the iris. You don't deserve to appear in my nightmares or have me waking up in a cold sweat, panicking you're asleep beside me. You don't deserve to have your name mentioned when I'm drinking wine on Friday nights with the friends you tried to convince me we're ruining our relationship.
You don't deserve to evoke any emotion in me.
And so when it begins, when your face lights a match inside me, I remind myself that you are as worthless as you tried to convince me I was. You deserve nothing more than neutrality and emptiness. You deserve to just float away into the abyss of the people who broke me and discarded me as if I wasn't the best thing that would ever happen to them. You deserve to be as unimportant as I was to you.
