I think about you all the time.  What I think of most is how it is that you can live with yourself? I wonder incessantly how someone like you can be so successful in a job that is made for someone with a big heart, when you have none.  It confuses me that a person with no empathy, no compassion and a hole inside where goodness should be, could carve a career for themselves in a sector that is all about empathy, caring and understanding. How did you deceive them, how do you deceive them? How did you come to choose such a path? What can possibly be driving you? Are you happy?

I will never let you go. You are there inside me because you were a part of me. I can’t pretend that you weren’t. How do you deal with this aspect of me?  Even if you never really cared for me, at least not in the way I cared for you, I must still be in there, inside you, a part of you, even now.  You will carry me with you forever, and I will be with you always. When I think of us together and us apart, I see myself from the beginning until the end and I’m happy with who I was and who I’ve become after you left, but when I think of you I can’t see the same thing for you. I see spite, hate, anger, ugliness, and a disquiet that stretches into a never-ending distance. Your sky ashen and the sun extinguished.  I’m so glad I don’t share that landscape with you.

There is no way for me to grasp how you saw me when we shared our pasts. I can only guess at that. Was I your attaché? Could I have been a convenience? Perhaps a buffer, a rock, an anchor, or maybe a dumping ground for your hand-me-downs. Maybe all of these things, but then, maybe none of them. Our minds cannot be the same, so I cannot know how you must have thought of me, only how I thought of you.

I loved you.

I loved you.

I loved you.

But you never really loved me.

Never will I love like this again. I can’t, even if I wanted to. That part of me is gone.

You are my never ending conundrum. You are an itch that can’t be scratched. You are the malignancy in brain cancer, you are the hate in the world, the distrust in the community, the loss in a tragedy. You are the break in my heart and there’s no way I can ever forgive what you did. I was foolish for loving you, but that fool is long gone.

I live in the light. You live in the dark. You sweep your tracks and hide your past, but it follows you everywhere you go. It’s in all you do; in your son’s eyes, in your husband’s touch, in your mother’s voice. It’s in the horses’ hooves, the crash of the surf and it’s a Guns and Roses song on the radio.

How do you live with yourself?