where the wild things are

What safe feels like.

You know what’s funny? I was never allowed to be angry. Not outside of my head, at least; the only place I could truly be free from you- except I wasn’t. You live there too. You live in the poems I read on stage, you live in boxes of our favorite candy, you live in the echoes of my mother’s voice, and most of all you live in my mirror. The one I look at because of you. The one that you shattered and never replaced. I told you I believed you were a good person. I wasn’t lying, at least not intentionally. I saw needles of good in your haystack of bad. I stayed as long as I did for a few reasons: 1. I wanted to prove to you that unconditional love was real, because you’re used to it being transactional. 2. I liked your head on my shoulder, and my hands in your hair. 3. I wanted to hear your laughter fill the air. 4. I needed you to fix the mirror. The second and third were accomplished- things I simply enjoyed about you. I lived in those moments for as long I could. The first was always an unlikely hope. A fact of your personality. The fourth speaks for itself. (When it’s not busy screaming in my head.) I didn’t realize it back then, but no amount of talking out our issues would help. Not when you still chose to be awful every time. I believed you were a good person, and every single chance I gave you, you went out of your way to prove me wrong. At the start, I told you I knew how it would end. That when things ended, when WE ended, it would be because of you. “Don’t be so sure about that,” you said with that Cheshire cat smile. We bet on it. Ten dollars. In a few years when your therapist asks you why you’re like this, you’ll talk about the people who let you down. The parents who didn’t pay attention. The world that didn’t treat its creatures with the kindness they deserve. You go down the list of names until you run into mine, and you omit it because there’s simply nothing to say. You’ll realize you lost something incredibly rare, and it will be too late. So here’s my final goodbye. I hope I live in your head. I hope I live in the poems you don’t read aloud, I hope I live in your next box of our favorite candy, I hope I live in the echoes of your mother’s voice like you said I did. I hope your mirror is haunted until you understand what it was like for me. But I know I don't live in your head. Because if you thought about me at all, you wouldn’t be living in mine.

thanks