#sanctifying deceit

you were never as deep as the shallowness you made me seem. i carried that belief like a confession, letting your gaze reduce me until i mistook your limits for my own. what i thought was depth in you was only the authority of someone who spoke with certainty and never with care.

the mouth that lies is said to deserve punishment—according to the faithful, according to every lesson that ever tried to make holiness simple. yet i kissed those lips anyway. i treated every dishonest word you uttered with tenderness, as though affection could sanctify deceit, as though love itself were a form of pardon. i held your lies close, not because i believed them, but because i wanted to believe you.

what i gave you was real; what you took from me was not. you learned how to harvest devotion without ever intending to return it, how to speak tenderness like a language you never planned to live in. i offered you my trust in full, and you accepted it as entitlement—draining me quietly while calling it love. you hid behind the illusion of goodness, convinced that believing yourself kind would absolve you of the harm you caused. and when i was finally empty—when there was nothing left to take—you looked at the wreckage and acted surprised, as if i had broken myself alone.

in my younger days, i thought awareness would save me—that knowing would make devotion impossible. instead, i loved you with my eyes open, and that is the cruelty i cannot forgive myself for. you shattered me because truth demanded effort you refused to give.

deceiver. coward. fraud. words for someone i once loved—truer than anything i could have admitted while staying. the damage was real, and so was the way you made me feel i deserved it. did you ever love me, or was i only a space to fill your emptiness, a name to claim without meaning it? i mistook that for belonging.