a letter made to burn

Our endless summer has become covered in frost. Our once vivid friendship has become dim and faded. The leaves, the grass, the flowers - they’re all withering. Everything is starting to look greener anywhere but here.

My back is beginning to bend under the weight of all your guilt trips and projection, my knees buckling from carrying all your self-made problems.

The scales have tipped. The good has been outweighed for months now. I cannot keep justifying staying.

My closed wounds, my beating heart, my smiles; I owe it all to you - I know. (If it weren’t for you I would already be a corpse.)

But I cannot keep handing you medicine when you have started exchanging it for poison. I cannot keep building you crutches for every gun you aim at me. Cannot keep wrapping your wounds for each time you pour salt in mine.

This shelter has become decrepit; rotted and collapsing and cold. How long can I keep trying to light a fire in the pouring rain? How long can I keep using soaked blankets? How long can I call this grave a home?

Your kindness has evaporated, your compassion shrivelled. I miss the smiles you used to give (the ones that were genuine). I miss the laughter we shared (the involuntary, uncontrollable kind). I miss when I wasn’t writing you goodbye letters in every silence. I miss when you weren’t a chain around my ankle.

I miss the days when your absence didn’t taste quite so much like freedom, when your presence didn’t feel quite so much like jail bars.

I have grown sick of hearing you cry wolf. Of always coming running. Sick of hearing “I’m sorry” and “I’ll do better” but never seeing a change. Sick of hearing you talk of therapy but never make the call. Sick of hearing the empty echo of your words. Sick of knowing they mean nothing

I’m sick of watching you throw stones from your tower made of the thinnest glass. Sick of feeling my patience slip away. Sick of hating the person I become when I’m near you.

I am sick.

Sick from you and all your polluted air. Sick from your presence and the way it has begun to stifle rather than strengthen. Sick from your sharp words and self-pity.

I am sick and you don’t seem to care.

I’ve had my suitcase packed for weeks now, had one foot out the door, the other held back by guilt. (I owe you everything. I know, I know, I know.)

I keep reminding myself of the lifeline you once were. Keep playing our past like a movie in my head. You owe her, my conscience tells me. She’s killing you, my survival instincts whisper.

Isn’t it ironic that the hardest words to say are “I give up”? They sound too much like a death sentence. But isn’t this how I save myself?

I will not go down with the sinking ship that is you. Maybe once, but not now. Not now when you do not even care if I drown.

You will not be my watery grave or my funeral or my eulogy.

How many times did I throw you a rope? How many times did I write you validations and hold your diary and your hand and your heart?

So maybe this debt is paid.

The truth is I’m not sorry I didn’t pick up the phone. Not sorry I didn’t lie down for longer, feeling your feet on my back. I’m not sorry my world doesn’t revolve around you. I’m not sorry because I tried and tried. I tried everything I could and then some more and it was not enough.

I owed it all to you but not anymore. I will not kill myself to pay back this debt. I resurrected you as many times as I could but I will not stand out under a stormy sky by your side when you could just step indoors. I will not drink this poison with you. I will not let you destroy yourself and blame it on me. (Not again.)

I will always sing praises of the girl you used to be but you have not been her for some time now. And I am no longer the girl who stays and stays, digging her own grave just because you are digging yours.

I am not just the girl you saved. I am the one you tried to shrink. The one who’s shoulders you piled your problems onto. The one whose neck you tied your rope around. The one whose lungs you filled with smoke.

I am the girl you saved and the one you tried to assassinate. And I am done trying to make sense of that.

I am done being your punching bag, your pack horse, your dart board.

I am done blaming myself for the cyclone that is you.

I know my flaws and faults and this isn’t one of them.

I give up.