#respect yourselves

And I know you can’t see it and will never read it, because I blocked you.

But writing this is not a petulant display, a hint for you to decipher. Those days are done.

This is a purge of the soul and the shedding of a weight, the aftermath of a grand realization.

I don’t know your full story and the depth of your pain. All I know is how it has bled through onto me.

I don’t think you ever had my best interests at heart but that’s okay; I didn’t have your best interests at heart at the start either. We were both of us two people who desperately needed therapy and chose to fuck each other instead.

The difference between us was that you were more than an orgasm to me. I wanted to reach out and touch your sleeping soul, to move my palms over every laceration, contusion, and abrasion on your psyche and numb the pain I couldn’t fix outright. I wanted to cook your dinner, fold your laundry, be your footstool…

But you proved to be a cold and rocky island, bereft of all life save for a skittering beetle here and there, deigning to risk being seen only when moving from one hiding spot to the next. Those beetles gave me hope for some time and I rejoiced and fell to my knees in thanks for the rare glimpse every time they flashed across the dry and moonlike surface.

I even picked at the ground a little, looking for their home, but the soil was far too stony and maybe I would have felt compelled to keep digging if only a shoot of green would show itself.

The trouble is there’s no lava flowing on your island to morph into fertile earth and no birds will come near you to drop seeds of life down below.

God knows any birds that have tried have wasted their time and their shit.

And perhaps one day lava will flow or a bird will shit or a leaf will sprout like a tiny green miracle in all the lifelessness. Or perhaps one day you will be loved for all the stone you are. Or perhaps not.

Who’s to say?

In any case, I quietly grew tired of stone, gave up, and moved on without another word to an island full of fruit and flowers, an island of my own making.

I wonder, without bitterness or sarcasm, how long it will take you to notice I’m gone.

When you do notice I’m gone I don’t suppose it will affect you much at all. If I know you, you’ll feel some fleeting disappointment at a lost opportunity for orgasm and then my memory will quickly move to the dusty back of your mind where it will die of starvation.

This is fine. I don’t hold any ungenerous feelings over it. We got on great once upon a time and then we didn’t. So it goes.

As you were so fond of saying: