#avoidant discard

I will reply with...

They handed me the scissors.

They know what they did.

No need to explain.

They didn't have anything else to say.

Why should I go out of my way?

That is on them.

The guilty always be runnin';

Runnin' away or runnin' their mouth.

I do not know if I was ever kissed, not by lips, but by the ghost of her. A girl with frostbite eyes and a disappearing heart, who drank from my wrist then wept into my ribs as if she hadn’t meant to stay.

She left with no candle lit. No letter. No signal carved into my fogged mirror. Only silence, like a knife left standing in a velvet cake.

Oh, I remember her, the way the world bent around her laugh, how my spine turned cathedral whenever she touched my name.

Now, I dwell in the after-room, where time has no heartbeat. She lives in my fever, in every missed call disguised as mercy.

I wear her absence like a mourning veil, tight, bone-split, beautiful in its cruelty. Every breath a rebellion against the grave she made of me.

Did she mean to vanish? Or was I simply a summer hallucination to her December soul?

No matter. I have become the ghost now. And darling, I haunt beautifully.

Yes, I did care. Very much.

The thing is, though...

They said they loved me, and I didn't say it back. I said I wasn't ready, but I knew I didn't feel it.

The thing is:

The principle of the entire thing, I guess? Affective responsibility? Surely, there was some degree of connection there. Some consideration was warranted.

The thing is, it hurt at first. Now I laugh about it. I am bitter, mostly because I can't believe I let myself get roped into whatever their game was.