You damaged me. You hurt me to the point where I’m not able to look at myself the way I saw myself before you came into my life. You made me into the person I am today and I’m not really someone who I’m proud of. You came into my life like a hurricane, breaking everything on your way and the aftermath that you left behind doesn’t look pretty.
It’s all dark and it will be hard to make the shattered pieces into one whole picture again.
You made me question love. Every time I meet a new man, I think about you and I compare him to you. I question his behavior and even if he tells me he loves me, I will never again believe it. Or at least it will take me a great amount of time to see love from a whole new perspective. Because when you claimed you loved me, I thought that love was supposed to be like that, that it needed to hurt.
You made me believe that putting in effort could help make everything better. Even though it hurt that much, I thought that if I put in enough effort and if I worked on our relationship enough that it could survive, that we could make it work.
I thought that if I loved you enough you could get over whatever it was you were dealing with. But it couldn’t be OK when the only person who was putting effort into the relationship was me. You didn’t think twice about letting me do all the dirty work.
I forgave you everything. All the times you would come home smelling like another woman and all those times you would tell me that I was a burden to you, I forgave you everything, thinking that it was probably my fault anyways.
Even when you would call me names and grab my arm to the point where it would be full of bruises, I forgave you. Because I thought that I deserved it, that the problem was me.
I wasn’t good enough for either of us. You told me that I was average, that the world would be the same without me and that no one would miss me (because you wouldn’t for sure). You made me believe it myself. Every little word you said to me made me believe that I wasn’t good enough and that I would never be good enough. Not only for you, but for the world.
I gave up on everything. I gave up on everything I loved and I was passionate about, because you told me that it had no purpose. When you would get mad, I would hide all my precious things, because before when you got mad, you burned all the gifts I got from my family.
You made me give up on the idea that I would ever again have something that would remind me of my grandfather or something that I could hold on to in the future. You left me empty. Without anything. Without myself.
HOW CAN YOU SLEEP KNOWING ALL THIS?!
At night, before you fall asleep, do you remember me? Do you remember anything? Does it hurt you? Did it ever hurt you? You were always so cold whenever I would beg you to talk to me, whenever I would try to make you stop doing all that. I had no chance. I had no chance when I was dealing with someone as difficult as you are.
People literally pulled me away from you when they saw that I lost so much weight, at the stage where I would faint from not eating. I was skin and bone.
I’m still recovering. Can someone really recover from you? From the way you treated me? Can I recover from the man I thought to be worthy of my efforts? The same man who would yell at me until our neighbors would call the police?
There is nothing you can do to make this better. Only I can help myself now. It will take time, a lot of it. But even if years are needed for me to feel better, in the end I will know that I have become stronger and I can conquer whatever life throws at me. Until then, I don’t want to know what you’re doing, I don’t need to know if you’re OK. Because you don’t care how I’m doing, either.
