What Was It, If Not Love?

Maybe your love language was hostility. Maybe it was anger, dripping from your words like acid. Maybe it was deceit, a slow rot that crawled into the corners of my mind, making me doubt everything I knew about us. Maybe it was manipulation, twisting the very shape of my decisions until I couldn’t tell my own thoughts from yours. Maybe it was control, the subtle throttling that left me breathless, my chest tight, my voice strangled. Maybe it was mutually assured destruction, your version of intimacy, a shared battlefield where the only victory was survival. And maybe—God, I hate to admit it—I hope you loved me. I hope the chaos, the verbal flays, the calculated silences, the shattering of my trust, were all your idea of affection.

I remember the smell of your cologne in the morning, sharp and overwhelming, cutting through the quiet I clung to. I remember the brush of your hand that wasn’t gentle, the too-hard press against my back, the eyes that gleamed with accusation. The nights I spent staring at the ceiling, my body twitching from adrenaline and fear, trying to parse your moods, became a ritual. I learned the rhythm of your cruelty—anticipate it, survive it, endure it—and I loved you through it. I stayed. I stayed while you disassembled me piece by piece.

Now the disquiet is a living thing. It curls around me at night, a snake coiling tight in my ribs, making it impossible to breathe without remembering. You don’t just hurt someone; you infiltrate them. You turn their laughter into hesitation, their certainty into doubt, their body into a map of fear and shame. And still, I remember the tiny, impossible moments when it felt like love—like maybe it was real—but those moments were flecks of glass in a wound, cutting sharper than any cruelty.

Sometimes I can feel the echo of you even when you’re gone. Not your voice exactly, but the cadence of manipulation, the way a threat can be a question, a question a trap, a trap a proof of care. It makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. And yet, beneath that crawl, beneath the hollow ache that has lodged itself in my chest, there is a pulse of recognition: I survived. I am still me. I am awake in my own skin, shaking, trembling, but alive, whole, and separate. And in that recognition, in the raw, uncompromising clarity of survival, the verisimilitude of this pain burns brightest.

I want to know if you ever felt it. Did it ever occur to you that your love—your violent, fracturing love—was a weapon? Did it ever strike you that the touch that bruised, the words that lashed, the cold glances that stripped me bare, could have been gentleness instead? Or did you only feel the rush of control, the intoxication of anger, the delight of my fear? And if you did, did it matter? Were the sparks of regret just another game?

I cannot answer these questions. I can only write them, let them spill across this page in jagged lines that mirror my heartbeat. I can only acknowledge that your love language—hostility, deceit, manipulation, control, destruction—was as real to you as any other. And I can only hope, with a grief-stricken, trembling honesty, that in some corner of your fractured heart, you loved me. Not well. Not kindly. Not gently. But loved me.

And that, if nothing else, makes the rage and the disquiet make sense. Rage without reason is chaos. Disquiet without reflection is madness. But rage and disquiet laced with the impossible knowledge that someone could love you in the wrong way—that is truth. That is fire and blood and glass in the chest. That is survival.