I’v started speaking like you. I’m using terms that only could have originated from you. I talk and I hear your voice. You never left me. You speak through my lips. You come at the world with a cutting sarcasm that people only find cute because they hear it from an innocent, naive young lady. A child.

No one took me seriously except for you. Everyone thought I was golden, but you saw me for how I really was. Gray, sprinkled in the ashes of my mistakes and dusted with the pieces of regret and cowardice that I foolishly hoped would just blow away in the wind. Instead they clung to me as easily as I clung onto your affections.

You changed me in ways that I didn’t want to admit. I thought of myself as my own person, and you agreed with me, but you knew you were changing me. You were selfish that way, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that you weren’t. You’d lie to yourself in saying that you cared about me, and my future, and my well being. You wanted me; you wanted all of me, no matter how you got it.

I’ve known this since the beginning, however. I knew you’d ruin me, but I went along with it anyway.

Because despite the hurt and the loss I’ve experienced in our relationship, it was a relationship.

I felt. I felt so much when I was with you. I hurt, I cried, yes, but I also laughed, and I smiled, and I gasped and I sighed and I keened.

I wish I could forget everything that happened between us, but I also really don’t.

And isn’t that just so unfair.