An Open Letter to the Most Disappointing Person I've Come to Know
My dearest mental ghost,
It's tempting to write about you like a nuclear physicist would about having seen the result of his work in Nagasaki. It wasn't the first time I saw the bomb go off, but it was certainly the worst time for it to go off. I'd studied you for years, and have you down to a science. I came to love you, even the moral fault in the theoretical implications of what you could do. Like any studious professional, this is my attempt to observe the destruction of the bomb you were. An ultimate "for the record". But, unlike the common practice in fields of science, personal emotion and bias will turn my bullet points into messy paragraphs. They say that the good die young so it's no wonder that it kills me knowing you walk the earth so unaccountably after what you did to me. Yours is the great American crime story with a heinous ending about your wrongful escape into the sunset. They'll someday study what you did to me in the same halls you study in now; how incredible it was for you to get away with all you did - almost robbing me of my own persona. In the beginning of the end I told myself you were smart, that you knew this newly-christened man of the house had no room left in his heart for empty space created by more abandonment. But that bullshit degree you traded your soul for doesn't teach a thing about how to be a decent human being. I don't need my parents to pay for me to have friends under the guise of legacy or lifelong connections. It costs nothing to support the people I've known since I was eight. You're about to learn that you can't fake your way through sisterhood just like you couldn't fake your way through love. I didn't feel inspiration the night we went to see the overpass on fire. I would never hold a match to every bridge I've walked over, I don't douse my ex-friends in gasoline to remedy the destruction brought on by a need to use people. You took the idea of phoning it in so seriously that by the fourth time I began to wonder how many other men you've disappointed by letting your hands do the talking. I hope his tie strangles you so that you can feel what it's like to choke on something more than just the words you briefly gagged on, threw up, and called your promises to me. Each new guy you latched on to was a replacement for me. You made me feel like a thing. A command-able, binary device that had no use after a while. You are just like that, so easy to move on. You subconsciously latch on to any trend and convince yourself that you have qualities which make you different from the crowds of people you walk in, all in the name of a false sense of stability. You selfishly sought the codependency you once knew, as if you were a lost child in the woods. But no child hunts for food like you preyed on me. You put me over a fire and I smelled like the certitude that always escaped you. Your sound is worse than the screeching of any bed frame you lured me to. Your demeanor is just as forcibly applied as a blind surgeon's stitches, and I'm here ripping away at your flimsy epidermic patchwork. A shrink tells me to not take lies so personally, but how can I do that when I staked my sense of self on your deceptions? I tried and tried and tried for sanity's sake, then what little defense you did offer consisted only of you trying to out-intellectualize me in order to kick the dirt over your inhumane ability to forget about and replace me. I will refuse to take your calls, you can't even greet me without being stuck in the dwellings of your own greedy intentions. I'm not even sure if people say hello honestly anymore, I've been emotionally suffocated to a life introversion thanks to the appearance you left with me. I'm not just the broken heart left in your wake. I'm the dead body you have to carry around in the trunk of your car while a new man obliviously rides shotgun, your fingerprints lay alongside my open wounds. You don't even have the guts to open the hatch and revisit that night, let alone touch Edgar Allen Poe's newest cadaver which you so recklessly curated. Damned are those who feel, and fucked are those who care; so I find solace in the drought coming your way, you manically desensitized hypocrite. I wish I could say that you are the worst kind of human being, but that would suggest there's others who have done what you did to me, after what I did for you. You acknowledge that I am the reason you continue to walk this earth with air in your lungs despite the events that lead to those winter nights where I was more sure I'd get struck by lightening than I was sure that I'd see you alive the next morning. But that didn't stop me from talking you out of the eternal darkness you were an instant chemical reaction from. Little did I know that I was doing my best Victor Frankenstein impression and giving life to a monster. Lucky for you I learned to sow my forgiveness seeds at an early age, so now you don't have to posture the pretense that you're actually sorry for the drought in your garden that caused a shortage in your personality. You left me every spring, expecting a new man to grow your flowers, only to come back at the end of every summer begging for the waters found in my immense capacity to forgive. But I am no gardener. I'm a man who feels like a poet-fraud, accompanied by the things he's come to love thanks to you. Alongside me I have the support of old and new friends. I have psychological treatment in the way songs of heartbreak speak to me nowadays. I have found a passion and fervor in anger and disappointment. I have a control over the darkness you left with me for life. I can use it to wax poetic - like I'm doing now, while you lie in the immense pressure caused by the vortex of your mind. Though you do lack a spine, I can't deny that you have some sort of heart. And in that misguided and unruly heart lies a solidified guilt that may very well kill you, like a self-imposed disease you contracted the day you chose to let yourself fall for another man for the last time. I unfortunately discovered there's a little part of me that is like you, on the few nights you sloppily confessed how self-aware you feel about all you did to me. That guilt will spread throughout your body as you come to realize that cheating on me repeatedly violates everything you hoped to see yourself become. No kid says she wants to be emotionally abusive when she grows up. But it's clear you never had the mental fortitude to do anything more than hope. You can't hope yourself into a good person with any semblance of an operating moral barometer. As I continue to fight off the lifelong demons you left me with, you'll sit there and hope your self-inflicted feelings of loneliness and regret don't take your life. Because this time you can't count on me being around to talk you out of becoming a statistic with a hole in her head. I had a hard enough time talking myself out of doing the same thing.
- Matthew
It's tempting to write about you like a nuclear physicist would about having seen the result of his work in Nagasaki. It wasn't the first time I saw the bomb go off, but it was certainly the worst time for it to go off. I'd studied you for years, and have you down to a science. I came to love you, even the moral fault in the theoretical implications of what you could do. Like any studious professional, this is my attempt to observe the destruction of the bomb you were. An ultimate "for the record". But, unlike the common practice in fields of science, personal emotion and bias will turn my bullet points into messy paragraphs. They say that the good die young so it's no wonder that it kills me knowing you walk the earth so unaccountably after what you did to me. Yours is the great American crime story with a heinous ending about your wrongful escape into the sunset. They'll someday study what you did to me in the same halls you study in now; how incredible it was for you to get away with all you did - almost robbing me of my own persona. In the beginning of the end I told myself you were smart, that you knew this newly-christened man of the house had no room left in his heart for empty space created by more abandonment. But that bullshit degree you traded your soul for doesn't teach a thing about how to be a decent human being. I don't need my parents to pay for me to have friends under the guise of legacy or lifelong connections. It costs nothing to support the people I've known since I was eight. You're about to learn that you can't fake your way through sisterhood just like you couldn't fake your way through love. I didn't feel inspiration the night we went to see the overpass on fire. I would never hold a match to every bridge I've walked over, I don't douse my ex-friends in gasoline to remedy the destruction brought on by a need to use people. You took the idea of phoning it in so seriously that by the fourth time I began to wonder how many other men you've disappointed by letting your hands do the talking. I hope his tie strangles you so that you can feel what it's like to choke on something more than just the words you briefly gagged on, threw up, and called your promises to me. Each new guy you latched on to was a replacement for me. You made me feel like a thing. A command-able, binary device that had no use after a while. You are just like that, so easy to move on. You subconsciously latch on to any trend and convince yourself that you have qualities which make you different from the crowds of people you walk in, all in the name of a false sense of stability. You selfishly sought the codependency you once knew, as if you were a lost child in the woods. But no child hunts for food like you preyed on me. You put me over a fire and I smelled like the certitude that always escaped you. Your sound is worse than the screeching of any bed frame you lured me to. Your demeanor is just as forcibly applied as a blind surgeon's stitches, and I'm here ripping away at your flimsy epidermic patchwork. A shrink tells me to not take lies so personally, but how can I do that when I staked my sense of self on your deceptions? I tried and tried and tried for sanity's sake, then what little defense you did offer consisted only of you trying to out-intellectualize me in order to kick the dirt over your inhumane ability to forget about and replace me. I will refuse to take your calls, you can't even greet me without being stuck in the dwellings of your own greedy intentions. I'm not even sure if people say hello honestly anymore, I've been emotionally suffocated to a life introversion thanks to the appearance you left with me. I'm not just the broken heart left in your wake. I'm the dead body you have to carry around in the trunk of your car while a new man obliviously rides shotgun, your fingerprints lay alongside my open wounds. You don't even have the guts to open the hatch and revisit that night, let alone touch Edgar Allen Poe's newest cadaver which you so recklessly curated. Damned are those who feel, and fucked are those who care; so I find solace in the drought coming your way, you manically desensitized hypocrite. I wish I could say that you are the worst kind of human being, but that would suggest there's others who have done what you did to me, after what I did for you. You acknowledge that I am the reason you continue to walk this earth with air in your lungs despite the events that lead to those winter nights where I was more sure I'd get struck by lightening than I was sure that I'd see you alive the next morning. But that didn't stop me from talking you out of the eternal darkness you were an instant chemical reaction from. Little did I know that I was doing my best Victor Frankenstein impression and giving life to a monster. Lucky for you I learned to sow my forgiveness seeds at an early age, so now you don't have to posture the pretense that you're actually sorry for the drought in your garden that caused a shortage in your personality. You left me every spring, expecting a new man to grow your flowers, only to come back at the end of every summer begging for the waters found in my immense capacity to forgive. But I am no gardener. I'm a man who feels like a poet-fraud, accompanied by the things he's come to love thanks to you. Alongside me I have the support of old and new friends. I have psychological treatment in the way songs of heartbreak speak to me nowadays. I have found a passion and fervor in anger and disappointment. I have a control over the darkness you left with me for life. I can use it to wax poetic - like I'm doing now, while you lie in the immense pressure caused by the vortex of your mind. Though you do lack a spine, I can't deny that you have some sort of heart. And in that misguided and unruly heart lies a solidified guilt that may very well kill you, like a self-imposed disease you contracted the day you chose to let yourself fall for another man for the last time. I unfortunately discovered there's a little part of me that is like you, on the few nights you sloppily confessed how self-aware you feel about all you did to me. That guilt will spread throughout your body as you come to realize that cheating on me repeatedly violates everything you hoped to see yourself become. No kid says she wants to be emotionally abusive when she grows up. But it's clear you never had the mental fortitude to do anything more than hope. You can't hope yourself into a good person with any semblance of an operating moral barometer. As I continue to fight off the lifelong demons you left me with, you'll sit there and hope your self-inflicted feelings of loneliness and regret don't take your life. Because this time you can't count on me being around to talk you out of becoming a statistic with a hole in her head. I had a hard enough time talking myself out of doing the same thing.
- Matthew
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