in response to the message i received last december from my abusive ex-boyfriend asking me why i keep writing about him even though i'm dating somebody else:

wouldn't you like to know?

i know you still think you're the innocent one, that you don't deserve to have all the lies you told split open on the operating table, all the moments between us dissected like cadavers.

as if you didn't leave me with crippling paranoia. the inability to trust somebody when they say they care about me. a debilitating fear of abandonment.

you said that it was inappropriate of me, that i was beating a dead horse.

you even had the audacity to tell me it hurt you. all the poems. all the prose pieces. the pain it put you through, to see me ripping through our relationship like canines ripping into flesh.

so maybe i'm writing this because i'm tired of choking on your arrogance. i'm finished with letting you think you got away with something, like i'm just fragile, easily cracked, hard to repair.

but i'll tell you why i haven't stopped writing about you.

because i can't.

i want to, but i haven't figured out how to stop when i see you around every corner.

because every time i think about the stars i think about your hands, and every time i find myself in the backseat of a car i can feel it closing in on me like your mouth.

because i'm afraid i won't be able to love him as much as i can.

do you know how that feels? to be afraid to love somebody?

i look at him and i see somebody who is softer than me.

because he fits into my side like a jigsaw piece but sometimes his voice lilts and it sounds like yours for a heartbeat and in that single second i forget you aren't here anymore.

because sometimes i forget you aren't here anymore.

i didn't ask to be stuck to you. i didn't want to still be bleeding a year later. but you have to ask yourself how deep this wound must be if i'm still not healed, you have to start looking at yourself. maybe you really were the monster. maybe you are.

but you won't. and that's why i'm still writing about you.

because you can't see it. you can't even fathom the thought that i wasn't just made this way. it wasn't somebody else who left gashes across my throat. it was you. and you can't see it. or you won't. i'm not sure which one it is anymore.

i keep writing because you never said sorry.

you will never understand, and you will never apologize. i don't know if you weren't paying attention when i was telling you to stop or if you heard it and just didn't care. now i'm not even sure if that matters anymore, you caring or not. it never felt like it.

i keep writing because i don't know how to feel about us now.

because you were so important and i don't even know what to call you.

because i can't tell if you were a forest fire or a hurricane, but either way you ravaged me.

because when you left you did not leave quietly, you left on a war path, smashing in the windowpanes and ripping out the ceiling lights,

because you left reminders, your spit splattered across the walls, your bloodied fingerprints smeared on the door frame,

because i am still too weak to be able to wash them away,

because i will probably always be too weak.

that is what you did to me.

for a long time, there wasn't anything left to build from.

i was bent beams and shattered glass with dusty kneecaps and rusted elbows, sitting out on the curb waiting for the garbage truck to come.

i didn't know how to look in the mirror anymore without being

afraid i would see you lurking over my shoulder.

eventually, i learned how to breathe again. i began to wipe the dirt from my cheeks and brush the blood from my mouth. i learned to stand on my own without you grasping my arm. i trained myself to smile; a different grin, one you wouldn't recognize. i taught myself how to unlove you.

so here i am, a year later.

the soft boy clicks into my hip and i am still writing about you.

you want to know if i'm still in love with you, if that's why the poems never stop.

it's not because i love you, or because i care at all.

it's because there's a long white scar on my chest from your claws.

because he touches it sometimes and that's the one part of my body where we don't fit like puzzle pieces, where we don't fit at all.

because that's the one part that's still yours.

i will write as many words as it takes to color it in.

-c.h.

~