I am different.
He seemed different now that I was looking at him plainly.
There were no voices saying care about him, no reminders of who he was, no blocking out of who he’s become. I wasn’t running excuses through my head. I wasn’t tired of running in circles. Before me, I saw a human being, I saw everything I had hidden. He had no aura that pulled me towards him, I didn’t want to speak to him like I always used to.
There was no ache in me when I thought about what we once were, there was no hope of what we could be. Having been ripped to shreds, not just by him, his actions, his words, but by myself, I sat across him, and I did not reach for him, I did not see what I once did. I was whole. I was complete in myself. He was not my better half, I was not half. Here we sat, as individuals, on individual paths, never converging, slowly we grew more and more apart. And now I remembered how I would attempt to build bridges to reach him.
How my bridges were always broken as the paths separated further and further by the day. How he watched it happen. How he did nothing but keep me on his side until I had no way back to mine. How I stood by his side with reckless abandon, not the slightest hint of worry in my mind that I was choosing to live my life within that of someone else. How he may have handed me the gun, later the ammunition, but how I was the one that had shot myself in the foot. Overtime, I became crippled by own naivety. I immersed myself in who he was and there I dwelled in ignorance. I suffered from hallucinations.
Rebound after rebound, I built bridges, and I was always stuck on the other side.
I was no longer entertained by the shadows of his former self. My delusions came apart at the seams and overtime, I saw through my own lies.
So,
With the strength I gathered, I made it back, with my wounds, I walked my path alone, but his always seemed more…whole. What I lacked I saw there and so I built bridges. It was a cycle of deceit I had built for myself, one he kept me in, one I kept myself in.
I chose to build my path when I no longer had parts to spare for injury.
I healed, I became a person instead of a parasite. My own self, that wasn’t contained in someone else. And now, I look at him plainly, and I know, I am different.
