To: The One Who Always Knew How To Twist the Knife

To: The One Who Always Knew How to Twist the Knife

From: Me

Subject: Resignation - Reclaiming the Throne

Effective immediately, I am stepping down from my role as your enabler, your apologist, your host... I am done. This should come as no surprise to you. The cards were dealt a long time ago.

I am done supporting you. Enabling you. Giving in to your pathetic demands, for lust, for deception, for the moral bankruptcy and messes I am still cleaning up from the last time I let you take the wheel.

Sanity, a grasp of reality. Control, a grasp of self. Both are hard to maintain, especially when so much of my energy, intellect, and heart is diverted to support you and your quest, your voyage to even lower new lows and beyond rock bottom.

I looked after you, tried to reason with you, even defended you. Base and foundational, I claimed there was justification and understanding to be found in your flawed and skewed desires.

Addicted, perhaps. But never vindicated.

At every turn, you returned my justification with tiny cuts, tiny undercuts to my conscience, sense of self, and confidence in my strengths.

When others challenged me, challenged us. I stood in your corner, and for what?

What did you give me in return? Were you there when I was at my lowest and pleading for forgiveness for the hurt I had caused and for my betrayal of trust?

Were you there when I faced the music for the behaviour you encouraged, trivialised, and downplayed?

You were nowhere to be seen. My greatest ally, you'd have called yourself.

But, allies don't abandon one another when the going gets tough.

So what does that make you?

My Judas? My own bespoke manipulative, sociopathic deceiver and betrayer.

I have lost so much. So much damn time. So much damn life. So much damn love.

Trying to save you, to rescue you, from yourself.

When I now see, I should have been trying to save myself from you.

Like every toxic relationship, ours was doomed from the day you decided to darken my door, and despite pleas for change, never even tried to become better, to become the friend, confidante, and supporter you claimed you were.

Decompartmentalisation, a clever tool for locking you down and locking you out.

No longer will you have centre stage in my cerebral nerve centre, the epicentre of my thoughts. You'll become nothing more than a parlour trick, a circus side show act, I wheel out when I need to dip into the decrepit.

I do not absolve you and do not disavow you, or even disown you.

You're a part of me — just not a part I’ll ever engage again.

There will be times when we meet again.

A reinforced glass partition will keep me from throttling the spineless, snake-like life from your being.

Officially, you're blacklisted. We all know you're there. Officially, though, we don't really care.

There will be times. Black days and lonely nights, when my thoughts will turn to you. On the days when the mess you left surfaces, because it will and does between my wife and I. On those days, I will recall your existence.

The control and command you had over me. I will then denounce it, deny my allegiance.

For too long, you had the reins. From now on, if only in modicum, calm and serenity reign.

I can remember so vividly, the lies you spun. Whispering in the quiet, hushed velvet half-truths and aberrations of what is right. You promised me love, belonging, and more. You stroked my hand as it clicked the mouse, and pressed my fingers against the keys.

Though my good, my benefit, you professed was your priority, I fed and fuelled your own hypocrisy.

Legitimising your crass and abhorrent needs with eloquent speech and bastardised reasoning. I gave in to you. That's on me. I will not pass the buck, though you'd like me to.

My cravings were yours, but became mine, and you monopolised my weaknesses for your own greedy games of illicit lust and 3 am self-flagellation, using me as your complicit, subservient conduit.

So, by all means, keep knocking in that dark void of my mind you reside. I can't say I'll ever block out the noise. But, I can say with full conviction, I'm done with our one-sided relationship of uneven power dynamics. With the hiding, the secrecy, the lies. I'm done with it all.

I'm done with you.

This is the last chance to have the right to reply. But, as you're not in control. That right just died.

So, accept your place, in the recesses, the corridors, the blackened cells of my untapped psyche.

I've changed the locks, the rules, and know who I am when you're not in the room.

You taught me how low I could go. Now watch how high I climb without you.

You can haunt the halls, but the throne is mine now. You only kept it warm for me.

Goodbye.

Officially and completely.

Most sincerely

Me.