published on sour cherry mag
I remember the way you looked at me, that very first time.
We spent hours in my bedroom, singing without inhibitions. There was a moment when the room fell silent between songs, you looked at me, and time stopped. From the second that time restarted, the clock began to count down to our collapse.
I was swept up in the whirlwind of a first love, a best friend turned lover.
A naïve, adolescent who assumed that love was painful. So painful, that I thought I would die every time you disappeared for days without warning. I felt reality, and my sanity, fracture and fragment until I could hold the pieces in one hand.
Somehow those remaining pieces kept coming back. After years of being beaten and moulded into what you wanted me to be, I knew nothing of a love that was any different.
You told me enough times that you loved me. But I felt your silence nestle in my core, while your affection merely scraped the surface of my skin. A skin that counted each betrayal in scars.
Those scars remain a reminder more than a decade later.
I remember the way I looked at myself in the mirror, after waiting at your front door in the cold.
I spent hours alone, ruminating on the words you said days before. Picking them apart, until I was left with a meaningless disarray of letters. I tried to stitch them back together in my mind, instead they branded into my subconscious.
You were raised in the shadows, and I threatened the home you found within them. You had no choice but to lure me in to join you, and conditioned me to believe it was the light.
After your soul and self-worth diminishes in the presence of someone you love, it feels as if no amount of light can reach you in the grave that’s been dug for you. A headstone with my name etched into it before I even arrived.
You claimed a part of me that I barely recognise. A part that exists in another lifetime, and to another version of me. Yet that part still taunts me, and bleeds into every lifetime in its wake.
It taints a love that the shadows would not otherwise reach. A love that was born in luminance.
I am haunted by the ghost of a first love turned abuser.