I don’t know if you loved me, or if the person I thought I loved ever existed. But the grief is in not knowing, of living in the question of whether we are dead to one another or not.

I didn’t realize I was leaving until you were already gone. I thought we were both just growing up. But it was me outgrowing you, while you carved me out piece by piece and built your new self atop my bones. I feel bigger and wiser than I ever did beneath your faltering shadow. But somehow you still look down on me from your pile of corpses. I don’t let myself feel small anymore, least of all from you. But I wonder how tall your tower of Babylon will grow until it collapses beneath the weight of the wholehearted lies you tell yourself.

If I let myself, I miss believing in the mirage of you that rose from the desert heat of our childhood needs. You needed a mirror. I needed to be seen. When my reflection refused to keep projecting your image at ten times its actual size, we shattered.

We left our shards in one another. Love poured out of my open wounds, that bad blood draining from my veins to nourish the thirsty earth rooted beneath my feet. But biles of never-ending hatred spew from your mouth, drowning whatever last gasps of good you had left in you.

I will never forgive you. But I carry the scars of you like a mother swaddling her baby. I feed her darkness with gratitude, clinging to the futile hopes of your better half.

I wish I could tell you that I can’t ever really leave you, that you are forever part of whoever I became. But you can’t hear me, as you climb over the poor souls building your towering god complex.

I loved you. I left you. You hate me. You buried me.