It’s strange how fallible we are. I’d built up strength, like a tree digging deep into the soil for its roots. I’d grown fervent. Unfurled like a piece of string, stood firm, two solid feet in a soldier’s pose. And then I saw your name and I crumbled. Rippling cracks through the branches swayed by the breeze. I have not fallen yet. But something in me has shaken.
Your bio was different. Had I affected that change? Had you actually listened to me? I don’t know what scares me. I had spent months leaving it all behind, forgetting it had existed or at least trying. So why has this, a wonderful, beautiful thing, caused me so much disruption? That you listened? When I had been so mad. When I was hurting, were you too? That realisation seems painful. I feel ridden with a kind of guilt. Why? I haven’t done anything wrong. I feel guilty for my thoughts perhaps. For having held so much antipathy. Clung to the pain of having lost you. Not recognising your subjectivity in that position either — that I had stung you too. Is that what bothers me? As I was breaking down, my only certainty was that you weren’t.
But now I cannot hate you anymore.
Perhaps that is what’s caused this flailing. I’d been held together by a desire to prove you wrong. When I’d never had to prove anything.
