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I wanted you to know that you hurt me.

I was desperate, really.


Many years ago I learned to suppress my feelings, my anger, my hurt. I kept pushing and pushing and pushing—down, down, down. I can’t say that the floodgates broke with you. It was crack every now and then, and little by little, water came seeping through. No amount of duct tape could put together what you broke inside of me.


Before you, I thought I knew devastation, I thought I knew betrayal—but boy, did I find out. Since that fateful day, it feels like I’ve been watching life pass me by. Like I’ve taken a back seat in my subconscious. Because of you, I knew what it was to die. To feel my heart break over and over and over again during sleepless nights. To think that it would’ve been easier to mourn you than to ever feel what I feel and what I would continue to feel. You killed me with no remorse. No care for my tears. No care for the pain you’ve inflicted upon me. I’ll never forget the callousness in your voice when you reminded me that you could actually be crueler.


I couldn’t imagine a reality where you did worse. Because in this reality, you didn’t let me express my anger or my grief. You didn’t let me be. All I wanted was for you to know that you hurt me and that I don’t think I could ever forgive you. To this day, it’s all I wanted.


But I realized that you already knew all of this. The truth is you don’t care. You didn’t care then and you surely don’t care now. You don’t care that because of you, I don’t know how to rely on my intuition. I used to think that I have trust issues, but the truth is I am actually too trusting, very gullible, and very easy to manipulate. This is because I take things people say very seriously—why would I assume I’m being lied to when I have no reason to believe you’d lie to me? Why should I go through life assuming the worst in people?


And I’ve tried to be hard. I’ve tried to be 10 steps ahead, but I’m not meant for games. Truly, I’m not. I’m comfortable in myself enough to acknowledge what I want and need from the people in my life. If I have to be in survival mode just to exist in your space, well… that simply won’t do.


I think the most devastating part was the desperation. I wanted you to care so badly that I lost pieces of myself in the process. I held on to the hope that maybe, if I just tried harder, if I just said the right things or showed enough love, you would finally see me. It was like watering a flower that would never bloom, and in that endless cycle of giving, I forgot how to nourish myself.


It’s a strange thing—how the longing for someone’s care can become a silent poison. How the need for validation can make you wilt inside, shrinking yourself smaller and smaller, until you’re no longer sure who you’re meant to be. That desperation—it’s a hunger that consumes everything in its path, leaving you hollow and gasping for breath. But eventually, I realized that no matter how much I wanted you to care, you wouldn’t. And I’m finally done being consumed by that want.

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