I don’t love you in an approachable way.
In a certain sense, I may not love you at all…
But when pain starts to kick up the sand in my life, I find myself reaching out.
You don’t see me. You’re poison to me.
You make my life sickly and weak, stained with your perspective.
You’re bad for me.
But you’re proof. Proof that I am worth such a vacant, all consuming love.
How romantically we hate each other.
What more is love than the stubbornness of two people destined to fall out of line.
You prove something oxymoronic in nature—that I truly exist and matter, and also that I don’t.
I know I should leave. I did leave. I don’t usually think like this.
I know I can do better. I know I have done better.
But I don’t always feel better, so some days it feels validating to push it better away, and sit with you, soaking up the poison.
I know I’ll regret this tomorrow. But I also know that you will too…
I am your poison just as much as you are mine.
Being your poison feels so much easier than risking the pain I could cause to those I love authentically.
The part that always hits me like a sucker punch is your perception of my innocence—
Forcing me to relish in my guilt.
Your shock echoes within my heart. That you couldn’t even permit me the possibility of hurting you. That you saw me utterly incapable of such freedom of thought.
You were wrong, of course. I left.
But in doing so I affirmed what you had hoped—
That you were but a kind and devoted soul. That you extended your hands to me not out of your need, but of mine.
And once again you were wrong. You only consoled me when you wanted to hear about your own greatness. You only needed me when the buzz wore off and the night got dark.
And I needed you much the same. To give me a purpose and a counter to my own imposter syndrome. To be like a planet in orbit, perhaps better known, but far from the brightness of the sun.
The sun, the sun.
Everyone sees the sun in me-everyone but myself.
Being the light in your life is an excellent lesson in astronomy— the supernova before the black hole. The beginning of the end.
And oh how I love the secrets I keep from you—a sense of security in the truth that you will never know me.
Surely I am better without your poison.
Surely you are better without mine.
A lesson in codependency, if you will.