I want to tell you something sincere. 

I know we’ve cut all ties on your end, but I still have this one annoying string lingering around my neck that I need to clip before I’m able to freefall on mine. 

Whenever I looked at you, I saw what the fox saw in the Little Prince. The sun came to shine on my life in the form of your eyes watching me, like I was some important and worthy thing for such careful attention. 

And you tamed me that way. 

I loved that about you ⏤ the way you looked at me.

There was still … hope in it. 

It wasn’t at all how I saw, or even still see, myself. 

There was a time a few years ago when I thought I was something. I let myself believe some hype that I was some kind of folk hero.

And the eventual fall from that internal peak back down to the reality of myself has left me with a limp, pain in my back and knees that crack the word “nobody” every time I get up to do anything so I never forget what I did to them. 

But for a little while you didn’t see that, did you? You saw something worth more than a simple glance. 

You know better now, I imagine, after seeing me so well.

Truth is, underneath it all, I think you and I can both trace the plot threads of how my story ends. 

I didn’t die heroically at the end of the previous chapter, and I didn’t get the “happily ever after” tagged on either. 

I just lived. I just kept existing somewhere out there in the world.

There’s no dialogue or importance left for me, but I’m still here in the background.  

And it’ll be that way until one day — long after I’ve completely vanished into the scenery behind everyone’s lives — I become that person in the obituaries where someone sees the name and the photo and yells to their partner, “Hey, did you know __ died?”

I’m not even young and hopeful enough anymore to think of myself as Gatsby. 

I’m a painfully self-aware Willy Loman who knows that I’m going to kill myself at the end of the play even though no one but family will come to my funeral and it will only cement my legacy as a pathetic person. 

I think when I finally let down my guard and my mask and the wraps covering up all my emotional and mental scars so you could see them, you knew that someone with this much damaged tissue never ends up “normal”. 

You knew you couldn’t build a dream on me.

You saw the same things you see day in and day out at work. 

You saw a broken being. 

You saw a hurt person. 

You know that phrase “hurt people hurt people”?

I don’t remember when I heard it for the first time, at what exact age. But something about it always stuck with me.

As you know, my first memory of life is one of the absolute worst things someone can remember even as an adult. And that created this sense of having darkness in me or this thing I had to protect people from. 

Because I was hurt. And “hurt people hurt people.”

That phrase made me wholeheartedly believe that I was a ticking time bomb. I didn’t feel like I was going to hurt anyone; I didn’t want to. But “hurt people hurt people.” 

It was inevitable, right? 

So I spent my whole life pushing people away like I just realized I’d been bitten by a zombie and didn’t want to kill the whole group.  

I spent my time in this world making people feel like I wasn’t interested in them or their lives, even though I was. I treated their dreams and hopes and fears and wants and needs with a safeguarded indifference.

This was me “protecting” the people I loved.

Because I was always waiting for some Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde transition at any moment that would make me REALLY hurt them in a way that they’d never recover from — and do so intentionally. And in that limited scope of thought, my methods were the lesser of two evils.  

But, instead of some unbelievable morphing trick, it was my fears and overreaction to that objectively-meaningless phrase that caused me to unintentionally hurt everyone I’ve ever loved. 

It became the self-fulfilling prophecy of my life that ruled where I went and what I did.

It was the biblical truth guiding all of my movements so that I didn’t stray from the path of what I felt in that moment was righteousness — never taking time to ask myself if it was what a good person would actually do. 

Now, I say all of that to admit to you that I’ve been so cold to you that I’m actually curious if you ever felt any warmth whenever you cuddled close to me. 

I’m sorry I never truly let you in higher than the landing of myself.

And I often wonder if there’s still any affection left for me anywhere inside of you, even though I know there’s no real reason for there to be now.  

But I don’t ask anything.

I’ve been quite thoroughly trained to not say a word.

Because I love you.

But I’m still hurt. 

And “hurt people hurt people.”

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