vee

your mother berates you for never wanting to leave your bed whenever you’re home or rather whenever you’re confined by the walls of what has supposedly been your home, your childhood bedroom, since years now but only ever felt like a prison while it was still considered your “home” at least. now your life is confined to suitcases and cardboard boxes, god college is horrible, a cruel reminder that you were right to think that adulthood will be lonelier than childhood ever was. because you keep slipping through the cracks and no one notices. your “shyness” that used to feel like an armour years ago, now feels like a sword buried in your stomach slowly draining your blood, invisible to everyone but you.

people you’re supposed to call friends but feel like captors always putting the panic rooms inside your mind into overdrive ask you how you’re doing, you tell them you’re fine obviously. they don’t believe you obviously. they’re ashamed every time you stop to count the tiles on the floor while walking to class or sanitise your hands over and over again in public obviously. they say they care but sometimes when they’re all talking you have to say things over and over again for awfully long minutes while they ignore you as if you’re not even there obviously.

your mother asks you why it takes you 20 mins in the washroom every night to brush and get ready for bed, you tell her you were doing your night routine. there is no night routine unless you count dry heaving over the sink, too scared to actually push your fingers down your throat. your father comes to visit every evening whenever you come back “home”, you both sit in silence not acknowledging the gap between you two that feels like an infected wound now. you only ever talk to him if you have to ask for money and he only ever calls when he wants you to play messenger for him and mom.

you failed an exam, she told you she’s proud of you still and you had to hold yourself back from begging her to just pretend to love you even if she actually didn’t, instead you just said self depreciating shit and sobbed into your pillow ignoring your aunt’s taunts. the summer after 19 you almost drop out of college over nothing. your “friends” think you’re being stupid, that it was not worth it. in the end you didn’t, you’ll have less attendance sure but you will still do it because you have to. you decided you’re not smart enough to get into college again so why not just pretend for everyone’s sake that you can finish what you didn’t even want to start in the first place.

on days when i have a blinding headache and everything is uncertain and my body throbs and aches and i don’t even want to get out of bed i shamefully will myself to read the last proof of your love for me no matter how naive it sounds now it’s proof nonetheless. proof of how at some point in time you maybe loved me. proof of how you went from wanting to watch constellations with me to telling me that i’m unlovable and rotten.

but would you believe me now darling? if i told you that it’s been four years and i can’t seem to remember the sound of your voice, or your sisters name, or the day your brother died, or why you hated your father so much, or why your mother always liked me so much. would you believe me? if i told you i haven’t had a single day of genuine happiness in all of these days even though i must admit i don’t remember if we were happy either but i remember being hopeful for the future and that’s enough to make me want to beg to gods i have never really believed in to somehow turn back time. there were days when i

hoped, prayed and even begged to you to let things be the way they were. to take it back. to make it right. and you said to me you can’t give me that. i was willing to wait you know? i did wait for months until you told me you hated me, until you told me i was your worst mistake, until i realised i was making you cruel and bitter the same way i have always been poisoning my mother. and if that night i had to scrub my bathroom floor with bleach to get rid of bloodstains that’s between me and some god i’m not sure about the existence of. and if i had to hold my wrist to my chest, staining my favourite blue hoodie red and sob into my pillow until i passed out that’s between me and the walls of my childhood bedroom. and if the next day i sobbed in my mother’s arms for the first time ever in more than half a decade until she pushed me away and called me weak and pathetic and then pretended it never happened that’s between me and her.

there have been days i wished you were still here, there have been days i hated you for being in my life’s periphery because you never fully went away

until recent. yet i still feel your presence no matter how hard i try to forget everything about you, you’re still a lingering phantom in my life taunting me mercilessly. there have been days after that fateful night when i deluded myself into thinking that there was still something left for us, every time you apologised but your heart never really was in it was it? because we have tried to write this story in different ways only for it to always end the same. there have been days i have thought about the plans we made, days i daydreamed about how nice existing together would’ve been until i realise that it’s all wishful thinking and we would’ve probably drove each other insane, because you were always too intense and it scared me and i was always too mild and it disappointed you and now you’re long gone and i’m driving myself crazy crazier trying to be anything but so so angry and hopeless all the fucking time.

i have so many things i wanted to ask you and still do; did you ever think of me when you were in her bed? did you feel bad? did she feel bad? did you feel thankful that i lead you back to her? were you angry when she broke your heart again? did you think of me when you went back to being just her friend? did you ever regret the things you said to me? did i ever cross your mind at all? now that you’re with him, do you ever think of me? do you tell him how much of a “bad” person i am? do you tell him about how much you despise me? do you tell him anything at all? do you think of me when he touches you? do you tell him about how you were relived when you got rid of me because i would’ve never touched you like that? does he even know who i am or rather who i was to you? do i ever cross your mind at all?

there have been so many people who came and went after you, some of them will forever know your name even though they don’t really know me anymore. there will be many more i’m sure, after all there’s only so much time and effort anyone would be willing to put on me until they leave and i find someone else to dig my nails in and cling to. they all tell me that you were cruel and i didn’t deserve it but i don’t think it’s true because before you were cruel you were nicer than anyone else had ever been, you were gentle until you saw me for who i was. and it’s not your fault that you could tell that the same cruelty that makes people softer was turning me into something rotten. it’s not your fault that you told me it didn’t scare you until it did. it’s not your fault that you were disgusted. you told her you never wanted to be on the list of people who hurt me but now you’re way up on it, even further up than her isn’t it ironic? it’s almost funny that i believed it when you said there was nothing i could do to make you stop “loving” me because all it really took was me begging you to be kinder to me to make you snap. you said you will never leave? never mind.

sometimes i wish i was still naive or delusional enough to believe that there was still something left for us. that you would come back and i would forgive you and everything will fall into place but this isn’t like the stories i read to dissociate from the cruel reality that my life has been becoming since years now. you are never going to apologise because you don’t even think you are wrong. and i might be waiting for apologies that are never going to come but deep down in my bones i know i am never going to forgive you for throwing back my greatest fear in my face. i don’t know if i actually want you back. i don’t know if we would have even made it this far, had things gone differently. i don’t know if i loved you. i don’t know if i have ever loved anyone. hell, i don’t know if i am even capable of loving. i don’t know if for me love is synonymous with violence. i don’t know if you were always cruel or if i made you cruel. i don’t know if you’re a good person. i don’t know if i am a bad person. i. don’t. know. i. don’t. i.

i wish i knew. i know i shouldn’t do this to myself. i know all of this is long gone and buried six feet under in the graveyard of your mind. i know i’m looking for skeletons. i know i should let go. but you of all the people very well know (knew) how my mind is wired, how there are some things i can never bury no matter how vile.