"We need to talk". These four words turned my gut into a hamster wheel and spun my mind like a dryer full of bricks. My future ex-girlfriend's knock on the door was morse code for “you failed again”.  

We wielded silence like blades trying to cut away and hoard the few good pieces left of our now failed relationship. But unspoken words are not weapons and vulnerability is not an arms race.

When the hammer finally fell, I felt an odd sensation rush through me. I was visited by a seldom-seen yet beloved patron of my brain I hadn’t seen in months. It was visceral relief like I had just scratched an itch on my face I had been fighting off for 6 months.

Cognitive dissonance is a subtle thing but it was practically slapping me in the face repeatedly until I was confronted with the realization that I have agency in my own life.
They say words create worlds and I have been the architect of my own prison for a long time.

Love has been a wound barely concealed, and intimacy is the bandage that I’ve tried to staunch the bleeding with. But I’ve ripped off my own bandaid so many times the wound has never healed.

It’s an odd dance the mind does when both craving and simultaneously fearing the very same thing. Like burning down your dream home because you got cold in the middle of the night and wanted to warm your fingers around the burning remains of your best intentions.

Every time I say” this one will be different” “I will force myself to be content.” But that works about as well as watering a plant with cheap ***** and wondering why it’s not growing. I've come to terms with my romance delusion. I am self-abandoning myself on an island to merely occupy the space.

“I need to find my better half,” I tell myself, but I severed the better half from myself the second I thought I needed someone to complete me.