Sometimes I think about the way you manipulated me — and I hate to think of it that way, but idk how else to think of it. You asked me if it was okay if you hung out after work with a friend. Of course it was? But that was the trick. You got my permission because I never thought I controlled you and never wanted to and because I thought you were hanging out with a friend.
But then the friend was someone you intended to cheat on me with, someone you intended to replace me with. I didn’t know that, and I had never thought you had to get permission from me for anything because I didn’t think that way — the fact that you were asking permission to hang out with someone as a friend was the reason I knew something was wrong.
You tried to use me to excuse what you were doing — what you knew was wrong. You knew it was wrong or you wouldn’t have felt guilty and you wouldn’t have twisted things around to get my permission.
I agreed to something under false pretenses. Then, by the time I understood what was going on, I agreed because you said he was just a friend and I didn’t want to control who you could and couldn’t talk to, and by then, because I knew you had feelings for him beyond just friendship (otherwise why ask to hang out with him?), you said you were confused.
On top of all that I knew you were grieving and you said your guilt had you crying and feeling like driving into oncoming traffic. So I acquiesced. Not because I wanted to, but because I valued you more than you valued me. I wanted you alive. I wanted you happy. I wanted you unstressed.
Please don’t ever assume you did what you did with my blessing. Please don’t ever assume I was in agreement that we were no longer in a committed relationship just because I said yes to you hanging out with someone “as a friend.” Don’t assume because I saw through that lie that me still saying okay was because I no longer wanted to be in a committed relationship with you. You got offended when I said you were cheating and lying — you claimed you were doing neither of those things because you told me, but what you told me was that he was just a friend. What you told me was that you were confused. By the time I knew differently I had already agreed to something that was very different from what was really going on.
You used me and my naivety and love for you to excuse what you knew you were doing. And despite knowing that and despite all the pain and hurt I’ve suffered from what you did, I cry because I still love you and I want you in my life. I was never confused. I never stopped loving you. I never wanted to lose you. You used my own integrity and love to hurt me and I can still excuse it because you were grieving and I understood. But today I need you to know that I fought for us for three months because I didn’t want you to leave me, I didn’t agree with you cheating on me, and I never ever stopped loving you or seeing us as a committed couple. I gave up that fight not because I gave up on you and us, but because I valued you more than I valued myself. I was falling apart at the seams and assumed you were too. I spent so much time wondering why you brought all this on yourself when you were already grieving, why I had to hurt because you were hurting, why your recovery had to include someone you barely knew when you had me right there. I don’t know the answer, though I suspect you didn’t take it as seriously as I did, but I do know that I saw all the stress and confusion and guilt and decided to not add to it. Even though I wanted nothing more than for you to honor your promise and your word to me and for us to choose each other.
It’s been almost a year since you tried to get permission to hang out with a friend — since I sensed guilt and knew there was more to it than just friendship because you had plenty of friends and had never once asked me to hang out with them. I sometimes wonder if your hope was that I was oblivious and ignorant enough that I’d say obviously yes and that would be all you’d need to justify what you were doing. What if I had never figured it out? Would we still be friends? I doubt it. Because once you had him you had no time for me. I would have noticed that even if I didn’t know what was really going on. Would you still be telling me you loved me while loving someone else?
It’s been almost a year since you turned my world upside down as if to punish me and I still cry every day. I still want you back in my life. I still excuse you because I know grief changes us. I cry grieving what we were, what I still want us to be, and the woman I knew and looked up to and always wanted by my side.
Please don’t use my “permission” as evidence I was okay with any of this — or as evidence than what you did was okay. Please don’t think I was giving you the green light to cheat on me, abandon me, and hurt me — especially not when your intent was for me to not know what you were really doing.
At the end of the day I forgive you. I forgive you because I value you. Because I love you. Because I now know how much my life sucks without you in it (though I didn’t need the time apart to know that). I forgive you, but until you take accountability for the cruelty of what you did and for actions you were very aware and conscious of, my forgiveness is meaningless. It’s an open invitation. If you ever decide you need me again, if you ever decide you love me, if you ever decide I matter to you, if you ever decide I am worth choosing, the forgiveness is there waiting for your accountability.
But I doubt that will ever happen. You have ignored me for nearly 10 months now after spending three months excising me out of your life for someone who you obviously believe is better than me. Only you choosing me again could ever heal that wound. And after nearly 10 months of silence and 3 months of me begging you to see what you were doing and make different choices and you doubling and tripling down on abandoning me for him, I doubt that will ever happen. You were not interested in listening to practicality then and I doubt you are now. I doubt I will ever matter to you again. Not when you have him.
You called him your destiny and your soulmate as if we hadn’t said the same things about each other. You called him your boyfriend as if I hadn’t already been your girlfriend. You said he saved you as if we hadn’t both been saving each other for over a decade. You said he understood you, as if I hadn’t been understanding you for over a decade. Everything you said about him that made him so wonderful you already had with me, but you were willing to ignore that for him. And even if I try not to hear it, that told me then all I needed to know. But I’m optimistic, and I know my love and care and choice of you was real and I haven’t given up on you. My nervous system only relaxes when I imagine life with you — when I imagine a future where you come back. I can’t always convince myself of that so I cry a lot too, and feel hopeless and worthless and like I should have known better than to believe you could ever love and choose me. It’s sad, really. For the first time I believed someone could love me and choose me and want me, and I opened up and was vulnerable with you and only you because I trusted you and wanted to be loved and chosen for the first time in my life. I believed you when you said you would never leave me and that you’d never treat me like the people who hurt me before. You were the first person I ever trusted with my heart because I believed you saw me for who I was and didn’t flinch — not only didn’t flinch but actually still wanted me, actually loved me, actually wanted to spend your life with me.
And now you’re a part of the long list of people who have hurt me. Now you’re just like all the people who made me feel worthless. You’re the reason I will never be vulnerable with anyone else ever again. You were it for me. And you still are. And always will be. I hope one day you realize what you did and how it was not okay. I hope one day you feel as much guilt over hurting me as you did for having feelings for someone you just met. I hope you come to regret your choice, and I hope you know that, when you do, I’ll still be here waiting for the other half of my soul to stop roaming around and come home. I hope you know that I shouldn’t still trust you, but that I do and will, because you’re the only person I ever trusted that much and the only person I ever would have trusted even more. I hope you think of me as much as I do you. I hope everything reminds you of me as much as everything reminds me of you. I hope you return to being the person I admired and looked up to, the person I was happy to learn and grow for, the person with integrity and morals. I hope you heal enough to see the damage you did while hurting and I hope you find your integrity again so you can make it better. I hope you realize that you took away my agency in our relationship and muted my concerns and my pleas for the attention of someone else.
Most of all, I hope you know that if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t have begged and pleaded with you for three months to return to your senses and come back to me. I hope you know that if I didn’t love you — if you were as meaningless to me as I apparently was to you — I wouldn’t still be grieving the loss of you in my life. I hope you know that if I didn’t love and value you that I wouldn’t have forgiven you and I wouldn’t want you back. I hope you know that if I didn’t love and value you I wouldn’t have tried to understand why you did what you did.
You used my dislike of labels as an excuse for why you didn’t know what to call us when someone asked if you were in a relationship, when there were dozens of things you could have said to indicate you were in a relationship without having to use a label. Because we were in a relationship — a relationship you denied me any agency in because you decided we weren’t really in a relationship so you could justify your feelings for someone else. You used the fact that we were long distance as an excuse for why I wasn’t fulfilling your wants and needs — you used my fear of making both of us miserable with things we couldn’t experience until later to justify why we weren’t really in a relationship, when I didn’t talk much about it because it made me want you even more and I knew neither of us could physically have each other until our relatives were gone and there was no way I was going to ask you to abandon your gma and aunt for me. You assumed that just because I had adopted the asexual label that that meant I wasn’t interested in having sex ever when asexuality is a spectrum, I would do anything for you, and I was never 100% sure of that label either and didn’t care because labels couldn’t define what was in my heart.
At the end of all of this, I still love you, really love you, deeply love you. If you didn’t matter to me that wouldn’t be the case. If you didn’t matter to me I wouldn’t be bothering to say all this now a year later. If you didn’t matter to me this past year wouldn’t have been so painful. But you do matter to me, what we were — and it was more than friends no matter what you think and no matter what you do to try and justify your feelings for someone else, we were more than friends and you know that and have known that it was just inconvenient for what you wanted with him and the fact that you could call him your boyfriend and claim you couldn’t have feelings for me because of him but you couldn’t name me your girlfriend to him and you refused to see that I was there first and was your girlfriend and that made what you were doing cheating has hurt me every single day since you said it — what we were does matter to me, what we could have and should have been does matter to me. Even still.
If you think I’m mad because of how I’m talking, I’m not. I’m being blunt, because I pulled punches with you last year because I didn’t want to add to your hurt and you used me pulling those punches to justify what you did. I don’t want to hurt you, I never wanted to lose you, but after all this time with no word from you I already feel like I have lost you forever — I felt like I had lost you forever the minute you asked if you could hang out with him as a friend. Every logical response I made you had an answer for and over time I’ve continued to understand how little your answers actually answered. I just didn’t want to make things worse so I stopped trying to advocate for myself — I stopped trying to fight for myself so I wouldn’t hurt you.
I don’t want to hurt you now, but I’ve carried hurt for a year now, and while I still miss you every moment of every day, I’m much less emotionally dysregulated now and able to talk without feeling like there are eggshells everywhere. I was never trying to “be right” — I’m still not trying to “be right.” I just can’t keep holding these feelings in and suffering with the weight of them. I just need you to know that I never gave up on you, I never actually got to decide whether we were over or not, I never felt like you were able to give me any time even as a friend because you were giving him all your time. I need you to know that I have never stopped loving you, that all this hurt would be worth suffering for you because I love you, that everything I have done I have done for love and that even if you no longer love me I will always love you. That if I didn’t love you I wouldn’t even bother saying any of this. Everything I did I did with you in mind. And it hurts to know that I didn’t occupy the same space in your mind — it hurts to know that you hurt me to make him more comfortable. It hurts to know that you valued us so little that you could enter into a relationship with him as if you had never been in one, as if I had never existed. When I said that I knew about him but he didn’t know about me, you said you talked to him but never told me what you said. He probably still has no idea that you were in a romantic relationship with your best friend, soulmate, and other half of your soul. I’ve often wondered how that would impact things. I’ve often wondered if he would be as upset about me as I am him.
If you ever feel like things can never be repaired between us, please know that that is not the case. Please know that even though I am hurt and even though your actions have hurt me, I do see a difference between you and what you do. You and your value to me are independent of what you do and do not do. Mistakes happen. Grief hollows us out and makes us strangers to our own selves (I don’t know who I am anymore since losing you, and I’ve grieved you as if you died because you’ve been so throughly gone from my life after over a decade of being a part of my daily life — after I finally found the other half of my soul, after I loved you like I had never loved anyone else). I may not understand how you could ever entertain anyone else when you had me (because I could never entertain anyone else because I had you — and even now I will never entertain anyone else again because you were it for me) but I know we’re all human and are imperfect. I never wanted perfect. I just wanted you. I still want you. So if, by some chance, you feel guilty for what you did and how it hurt me, and that guilt convinces you that you can’t ever reach out or speak to me again because you hurt me and I probably hate you, please know I have never hated you. Please know that the only thing that could possibly soothe the hurt is you. Please know that I love you more than any hurt could make me forget. Please know that what has happened is the worst thing that could happen between us and despite that I still love you. You will always have a place in my heart because you were always a part of my heart. It only hurt because you took half my heart with you when you chose to leave. It only hurt because I thought I knew your half of the heart well. It only hurt because I see there is so much more we could and should do in this life — more for us to know about each other in spite of how much we already know. I have used our time apart to grow. I focused on growing because I want to be the best I can be for you. I want to be someone you would choose. I want your half of our heart to have somewhere safe to come back to if you ever decide to come back. I haven’t used this time to analyze myself and grow and gain new perspectives because I never want to see you again. I did it in hopes you would come back. So please, if you miss me, and if you’re willing to give me time and attention again, if you need me, if you want me, if you care…..please don’t ever fear coming back, please don’t ever feel like you can’t come back. My heart is home for you as much as yours is for me.
You can always come back.
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
