and i just wish you were a better man

cr: pinterest

the decision to leave a love that still possesses the power to make your chest ache is not a grand, cinematic explosion. as if it was a cold and clinical autopsy performed in the dead of winter. standing before the mirror at 4 am, looking at the dark circles under my eyes and the hollow curve of my collarbone, the truth becomes undeniable: the bravest thing i have ever done was turn around and run.

it was an act of brutal self-preservation, a sudden, desperate flight from a house that was slowly burning down around me. yet, even as i recognize the permanent damage left in the wake of your behavior, the ghost of what we used to be still haunts the corners of the room.

​this is the anatomy of a “what if.”

it is the exhausting, cyclical grief of missing someone while simultaneously knowing exactly why you had to say goodbye. i can chart the reasons like the back of my hand. the careless words i waited on for hours, hoping they might miraculously turn sweet again the way they were in the beginning; the suffocating weight of your jealousy; the cruel way you talked down to me, acting as though my presence was a permanent guarantee rather than a choice i made every single day. you pushed my love away as if it were a loaded weapon, terrified of its power, never once believing that i would actually have the courage to walk out the door.

​the tragedy of our story does not lie in a lack of love. it lies in the devastating deficit of your character. i hold onto my pride these days because it is the only dynamic piece of debris i managed to salvage from the wreckage of us. i gave you the absolute best version of myself. i gave you my patience, my art, my youth, my silence. and we both know, in the quiet honesty of our separate lives: that you cannot say the same.

​i am left to write this literary eulogy for a potential that never realized itself. i am forced to wonder, with a bitter, lingering sadness, what beautiful monument we would have become if you had only possessed the strength to be a better man.

we might still be in love today.

we might be building a life instead of nursing wounds.

if you were a better man, you would have been the one i stayed for, the one i protected, the one i grew old with. but you chose the smaller version of yourself, leaving me with no choice but to become the hero of my own story, walking away from a magic that turned into a curse.