Thoughts of a Dying Athiest

Some of my favorite PQHAÜS pieces

I had literally just lost everything I owned in an apartment fire. And I had just attempted like a week or two before. You knew both of those things.

You trauma dumped on me for 45 minutes about how your mom tried to kill herself and about your cats and your dad and your grandma and everything that’s been going on with you and her and your kids.

And I listened to you. I told you how sorry I was and how hard that must have been. I was nothing but kind and genuinely sympathetic.

You brought up our friends and how they chose to stop being friends with you and how you told John you’d rather kill yourself than stay with me. I’m not sure how I can interpret your choice to tell me that as being anything other than just straight up fucking mean BUT I do have some outstanding news that I think you’ll be thrilled to hear. We aren’t together anymore. You broke up with me. Remember? So you don’t actually have to kill yourself because you can’t stand being with me.

You were so condescending the handful of moments we talked about anything relating to me. And bitter. What the fuck do you have to be bitter about? I’m not the one who cheated for over a decade starting at fifteen years old. I’m not the one who has a decade long track record of lying. If your life is going down the tubes, that’s not on me at this point.

But honestly fuck me and all I’m going through right? We don’t have time for that.

Oh I’m sorry, you DID say “I can’t be that person for you but if you want to talk about it for a minute I’ll listen.”

A minute.

Thank you. How generous.

I did not reach out to you. Ever.

You texted me in the middle of the night last year in February and said you “miss me sometimes” and I told you I’m still heartbroken, please don’t contact me again.

And then a year later you called me and I was stupid and self punishing enough to answer not once but twice.

The second time you called, that same day, worked the fuck up. “Brie said you called me selfish. I just want to know if she’s lying or not.” I mean you are but “I don’t think so.” *click*

And when I have the audacity to call you back and request - not that you stop fucking calling me - no, but that you not call me when you’re acting like a psycho. (I believe the phrase I used was “amped up”.) And then you hung up on me again.

Like dude. Come on.

And for the record I did not reach out to Brie either. She reached out to me. I don’t think I have once prompted a conversation between the two of us in the few months we have been occasionally talking.

If she has questions or she wants to give me her perspective (a perspective that leads me to believe that god, MAYBE it actually wasn’t all my fault and maybe I WAS enough and maybe just maybe I can forgive myself for my part and finally let go) I think I have the right to hear her out if I want to. And to be frank after thirteen years of being with you and you doing me like that in the end- man I don’t owe you shit.

(And for the record, I know she doesn’t give a fuck about me either. But at least shes polite. 🤷‍♀️)

I don’t know if you’re abusing her like she says. Only you and her know what’s gone down between the two of you. But what I do know now, finally, in my bones, is that you are not a good person. And you never have been.

In the end I have discovered you are more than an incredible liar.

You are a shape shifter.

You are whoever you need to be to get what you need from the person in front of you - attention, trust, love - to satisfy that craving, to sooth that self hatred, to fill that unending black hole that sits in your chest.

And then you use that acquired trust as fodder for the next person. You say horrible things and lie about the people “important” to you as a form of bait for whichever woman you’re currently texting at 3am. They think they’re special because you’re “confiding” in them but they’re not. No one is special.

They are your current audience, nothing more.

It’s taken me four years and all of this bullshit to realize that the person I loved for almost half my life truly never existed in the first place.

And somehow, even after all this time, even after losing literally everything, my plans for the future, my brother, everything I own, and now most recently my oldest friend - you are still somehow taking from me. There is still somehow room for even more grief.

At this point I feel like I am more grief than person.

But at least I am something I guess.

At least I am here.

____________

“I fell in love with someone in a costume

soft sweet words soothing,

coated in sugar free syrup.

You are a story I told myself at night

so I could dream of futures that were never mine to dream.

And now my chest aches

and swallows us whole,

dragging us both down into a dark heavy sea.

But you were always a shadow,

an idea,

a ghost.

So l am the only one that is drowning,

holding a hand that never existed,

feet planted on the ocean floor

and breathing in deep.