Picket

We've got some ways to go, if we ever found each other trying to traverse a path together.

That picket fence you spoke of, that one with all the pretty green grass and flowers dotting around a house of yellow or blue - whatever suits your fancy - seems just out of reach. It's like a perfect little dream, all wrapped up and easily in reach.

If you could have made me continue to dig at it with you.

You have a funny way about leveraging your wants against mine, making it really easy to kind of dig the knife in where you'd think there's birds chirping and neighbors walking.

No, it's... more like a memory of a nightmare.

Every single moment we spent together, was hell on Earth. The moment you touched me, it all went wrong. A hand on the shoulder, a hug. It was... revolting, like I was taking my skin and turning it inside out because every emotion I had at you felt unreal and bare.

It was like you couldn't stop hurting me, and I couldn't stop hating you. I hated the thought of being a part of you. That I was some... fucked up spawn meant to just watch you burn alive. Burn yourself alive while your mother threw sticks into your tinder.

What kind of hell would you have had me live, watching that all go down and then stick with it? Forty years of hell like you? Huh, maybe I can start having kids right around when you do?

No. No. I'm not. I never did and I never would.

Because I didn't.

I'll never understand how you could be the mat on the floor, and then complain when shoes walked over you. I'll never be able to quite comprehend how you wanted me so bad, but you did next to nothing to take care of me. Teeth aching? Yours were rotten. Head hurting? Clean the house. Ugh! I don't know why I admired you! I don't know why I believed in you so much until we were throwing blows at each other that day when I knew it was all a façade.

You never cared about me! You never cared about her! You only cared about how tortured you were and how much you just couldn't fucking leave!

And that's why you're still there, right?

Still letting her within reach to chase you.

Letting her be more than a haunting memory to you.

And you'd be that for me to. You'd give me that.

I want so bad to say somewhere in me loves you, but I don't. I want to say that I hate you, but I don't. I pity you, in the way that someone watches an animal suffering in a cage in a zoo and walks on. We're not the same. You and I.

You may have had me, but I'm not here to live and just die.

Signed,

You know who