Musings of a Dove

Letter to a stranger

To think I loved you...

To think I loved you for so long and so deeply despite all the times you've broken me ...

You paint yourself beautifully in the eyes of the world. It must be so tiring, so consuming, a never ending performance. Sometimes I wonder if you believe it too, maybe you need to.

Maybe that's why, even in the absence of an audience, you act. You act as if my pain offends and hurts you. Your words slash through me and I feel the rage, and pain and heartbreak gush out. I feel as if I need to hide these wounds so that they do not paint you the villain, for both our sakes, as you'd peel off this label like a coat and drape it over my shoulders like you have done so many times before. You'd force me to admit that I am the one who is evil, wrong... Wrong for not forgiving you even though you've never asked, wrong for being hurt by you, for deserving it, for making you feel guilty...wrong for not loving you enough...

But I did, I did love you. I loved you when your actions and words left bruises on my body and mind, I loved you when you would console me, I loved you when you built me up and I loved you when you tore me apart. I loved you so much that I abided by this unspoken rule, I did not speak to you of the horrors you inflicted on me and I was grateful for the good you did. Until it was too much, until I could take no more...my body has healed over but my mind...

My dreadful mind is weak and cannot make sense of the contradiction that is you, cannot make sense of loving someone who has no empathy, no sympathy and no guilt... at least none for me. You'd shed a tear for every miserable soul, proclaim heartbreak over their painful cries...yet you ignored my own.

I loved you so much even when I confronted you. I wanted no apology, no tears, no pain, just the truth. I wanted to hear you say what had happened to me aloud. Why? I don't know...I guess in order to love you I needed to know that you are at least aware of all I sacrifice to keep this feeling alive. But I remember your eyes widen in surprise, I remember contempt washing over your face, I remember loving you so much that I believed your denial, even if that meant having to believe I was losing my mind. I frantically went over events, wondering if I truly had created some twisted reality and the one the outside world was seeing was not as false as I'd made it out to be.

To think I loved you even after that...

I don't know when it changed or why, maybe because it had to, but at some point I realized I didn't love you anymore...I want to retreat when you touch me, I tense up when you put your arms around me... I deflect when you tell me you love me. I know what you're looking for and it isn't there anymore.

To think I loved you so much and now you're just a stranger.

To think you are a stranger I still call mother.