a real f*cking legacy

And when I think of you now, it no longer hurts. It stings, like a paper cut. It's uncomfortable, like staring directly into the sun. It's a nuisance. Something that's no longer familiar, no longer safe.

After all these years, these thoughts are still what keeps you awake at night, even though you'd sworn to yourself you wouldn't go back there. I think it's because we faded over time. Quietly. Naturally. I didn't disappear from your life - the parts I gave to you just became smaller and smaller and one day you no longer recognised them as mine. Sometimes I find myself thinking it would've hurt less if there'd been a big fallout. If there'd been hurtful words and betrayals and ugly truths. My loud laughter faded to whispers. Whispers faded to silence. I belonged to you and then I didn't. And even though you don't want to, you find yourself lying awake in the middle of the night, your finger tracing the spot where I used to stretch out my hand, waiting for our palms to meet.

I‘m no longer hurt by the things you said to me, but the way you saw your opening and got out stays with me. It was easy for you. So convenient to flee whenI wasn't looking. I was too busy rearranging my memories in my head, too caught up changing up conversations so they would have a better ending. Words said in anger lose their sting over the years, and yet every single one left its mark. Another nick in the flesh, another brushstroke added to the mural of our past. Sometimes my fingers brush over the places you touched and I remember how it felt when your knife split my skin. It's all right, I tell myself. It's all right to no longer want to see my scars and view them as landmarks of the town we built together. You weren't the first person I'd loved and lost but it still took me by surprise when your face that used to feel like a road map for me turned into no-man's-land. The tells I'd memorised over the years lost their meaning. While I used to read your mood by the tilt of your chin, I see nothing when I look at you now. Empty eyes and a mouth that speaks a language I became rusty in. I wonder when it changed. When the car drove right off the road. By now it doesn't matter. It only matters that it did.