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We broke up. It didn’t work out. It was neither you nor me, but then again, yes.
Don’t say that I dumped you… I don’t believe I’ve ever, in my life, used that term. As a card-carrying WASP, it just sounds vulgar. More importantly, though, I can’t think of a single circumstance in which a breakup is entirely one-sided.
That’s not to say that breakups are 50/50. Rarely are they even 60/40. But “dumping” implies fascism; there’s a dumper and there’s a dumpee, a mound of barren earth to be excavated then discarded, or, best case scenario, sheepishly offered as somebody else’s problem by a hand-scrawled sign announcing “Free Fill.”
That’s just not accurate. It’s so passive; is that how you want to live?
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to lecture.
It’s not that I’ve never been on the minority side of a breakup; I have. Two letters—T.J. Guy positively gutted me. Or how about when A. was so immature, even by 8th grade standards, he enlisted J. to break the news to me. Which was actually how F. had ended things a year earlier. Unsurprising that they took a page from the same playbook, considering they had been on all the same teams together.
And, OK, yeah that was a long time ago, but I promise you, you DO NOT want to go tit-for-tat with me in any type of pity party because I will bear my heart so viscerally it will make YOU uncomfortable, while I laugh sadistically because I’ve already come to terms with the pain. Trust me, I’ve had plenty of relationships end when I didn’t want them to.
There was a long time when I was the more invested party in this relationship. I didn’t mind—you were funny—are funny, sorry. You’re funny, you’re cool, and I liked you so much.
The fear of going unreciprocated has never gotten in the way of me saying “I love you,” so when I said it to you the first time, and many times thereafter, to be met with “aww!” or “thank you” or sometimes silence, it didn’t bother me. It really didn’t. Because I know myself, and I know I fall fast and I fall hard and I fall often. And I’d rather express that to you, even if the feelings were not mutual, than keep it pent up.
Eventually you loved me back, but not as much as I loved you. But I guess the difference, and I’m not gloating, is my love is not as stable as others’. I think that’s where we went wrong.
Caring more about you than you did about me burned through the stash of sticks to feed the flame in my heart. There are no logs left. There is no more kindling. And the embers are just about extinguished.
Does it enchant you, to watch what was once a bright blaze peter out into orange-black coal? Does it compel you to fan the air frantically, feeding the cinders with oxygen, the opposite of how I used to suffocate you?
Don’t waste your breath.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound cruel, I truly don’t. I just know myself. Save your energy. Let the coals die; fade to black.
Let the coals die; fade to black.
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