Aug 2014
I'm too nice. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel mean. It makes you uncomfortable, being silent when I reach out.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too attentive. You can always be sure I'll try my hardest for you. Buy you little things. Bring flowers. It's boring. You know it shouldn't be but somehow it's just too predictable. Somehow you wish you wondered if I'd stay, and every day I reassure you that I will.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too in love. My love for you makes you feel guilty, as if you can never match it. My sensitivity to your desires makes me sensitive to your dissatisfactions, and although you know it shouldn't, it irritates you that you can hurt me. It makes you feel uncomfortably inadequate again. You remind yourself that love is not a contest between lovers to be the most devoted, nor to be the least injured, and so you've neither lost nor won, but still you have a sense of both, an unsettling sense of both.
Reasons to leave.
Your discomfort leads you to anger. You lash out, ashamed even as you do, and my forgiveness enrages you. You want me to hate you. Want me to react as you would if you were abused. Wish you weren't the abuser. Wonder how you became so. Hate me for bringing it out in you, for before you met my soft, pliant love, my understanding heart, my forgiving mind, you never wanted to strike anything lovely with the flat of your hand to watch the welt rise, a satisfying flaw.
Reasons to leave.
Who are you becoming? Who have you become? It can't be you who is wrong, not when you've only been reacting. I've laid myself down. That must be it. I have goaded and invited you. I've tricked you into hurting me and then shed tears as if I didn't know it'd sting, and yet I refuse to fight you. It must be because I can't. If I could, it would mean that you were attacking someone who meant you no harm, only love, only LOVE! No, no it must be that I have no fangs of my own, only guises. It must be that the only way I can hurt you is to lower you, to make you hurt me and then feel the guilt of it, to turn you against yourself. I have engineered this. You won't be tricked by me! You will keep on until I admit I planned to control you.
Reasons to leave.
It has been too long. Something is amiss. By your estimations, I should have folded by now- confessed that I was never nice, only weak. Repented. Explained that I tempted your cruelty in order to make you loathe yourself. Apologized. Begged. But it has been too long, and I am still forgiving, I am still hurt but not vicious. You decide I need to understand I've done wrong. Apologize, you say.
Reasons to leave.
I do. I am sorry. And you find that the sorrier I am, the angrier you are. The more I tell you you are right, the more you want me to tell you you're wrong. To fight. To be cruel. Untoward. Wrong. You want me to fight so that I will prove I am like you, show my colors. After all, I made you this way. I must be as you are to have brought such venom out in you with such skill. I apologize again. I beg. And you find that the begging makes you want to hurt me, sink a knife between my ribs to watch me squirm the way you're squirming, spitted on the notion that perhaps, just maybe, I was never cunning or sneaky, never manipulative, never trying to take you down... The growing, sickening feeling that maybe I was telling the truth, maybe I loved you, love you. Maybe I really just wanted to bring you flowers.
Reasons to leave.
And now you can't look at me. You wish beyond anything you have ever wished before that you still believed me underhanded. But the part of you that respects me is growing, that understands me, and with it grows a horror that you have acted on a false certainty. And now even as you realize that, you realize that if you apologize, I will forgive you. And if I forgive you, you will hate me for it. And if you hate me for it, you will no longer have any excuse outside the boundaries of yourself. If you hate me for it this time, it will be from a dark, ugly thing inside you. Something you will have to be responsible for.
Reasons to leave.
Because if you never acknowledge it, never apologize, I can never forgive you truly, right? And if I can't, then you can't hate me, and you can't have been so wrong. And so you don't. And for a while it seems to work. But then you realize that somehow, I am not holding you responsible for your cruelties. Nobody is. You've not acknowledged them, and I've found some infuriating way to ignore them and love you past them. And you realize it's not fair. You need it to be fair. It's maddening. It makes no sense.
Reasons to leave.
And now you understand that there is only one way to escape the torture of being forgiven for something awful that you never even apologized for, having sidestepped so many imaginary snares that you've tangled yourself up in your own assumptions and insecurities.
And so
You leave.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too attentive. You can always be sure I'll try my hardest for you. Buy you little things. Bring flowers. It's boring. You know it shouldn't be but somehow it's just too predictable. Somehow you wish you wondered if I'd stay, and every day I reassure you that I will.
Reasons to leave.
I'm too in love. My love for you makes you feel guilty, as if you can never match it. My sensitivity to your desires makes me sensitive to your dissatisfactions, and although you know it shouldn't, it irritates you that you can hurt me. It makes you feel uncomfortably inadequate again. You remind yourself that love is not a contest between lovers to be the most devoted, nor to be the least injured, and so you've neither lost nor won, but still you have a sense of both, an unsettling sense of both.
Reasons to leave.
Your discomfort leads you to anger. You lash out, ashamed even as you do, and my forgiveness enrages you. You want me to hate you. Want me to react as you would if you were abused. Wish you weren't the abuser. Wonder how you became so. Hate me for bringing it out in you, for before you met my soft, pliant love, my understanding heart, my forgiving mind, you never wanted to strike anything lovely with the flat of your hand to watch the welt rise, a satisfying flaw.
Reasons to leave.
Who are you becoming? Who have you become? It can't be you who is wrong, not when you've only been reacting. I've laid myself down. That must be it. I have goaded and invited you. I've tricked you into hurting me and then shed tears as if I didn't know it'd sting, and yet I refuse to fight you. It must be because I can't. If I could, it would mean that you were attacking someone who meant you no harm, only love, only LOVE! No, no it must be that I have no fangs of my own, only guises. It must be that the only way I can hurt you is to lower you, to make you hurt me and then feel the guilt of it, to turn you against yourself. I have engineered this. You won't be tricked by me! You will keep on until I admit I planned to control you.
Reasons to leave.
It has been too long. Something is amiss. By your estimations, I should have folded by now- confessed that I was never nice, only weak. Repented. Explained that I tempted your cruelty in order to make you loathe yourself. Apologized. Begged. But it has been too long, and I am still forgiving, I am still hurt but not vicious. You decide I need to understand I've done wrong. Apologize, you say.
Reasons to leave.
I do. I am sorry. And you find that the sorrier I am, the angrier you are. The more I tell you you are right, the more you want me to tell you you're wrong. To fight. To be cruel. Untoward. Wrong. You want me to fight so that I will prove I am like you, show my colors. After all, I made you this way. I must be as you are to have brought such venom out in you with such skill. I apologize again. I beg. And you find that the begging makes you want to hurt me, sink a knife between my ribs to watch me squirm the way you're squirming, spitted on the notion that perhaps, just maybe, I was never cunning or sneaky, never manipulative, never trying to take you down... The growing, sickening feeling that maybe I was telling the truth, maybe I loved you, love you. Maybe I really just wanted to bring you flowers.
Reasons to leave.
And now you can't look at me. You wish beyond anything you have ever wished before that you still believed me underhanded. But the part of you that respects me is growing, that understands me, and with it grows a horror that you have acted on a false certainty. And now even as you realize that, you realize that if you apologize, I will forgive you. And if I forgive you, you will hate me for it. And if you hate me for it, you will no longer have any excuse outside the boundaries of yourself. If you hate me for it this time, it will be from a dark, ugly thing inside you. Something you will have to be responsible for.
Reasons to leave.
Because if you never acknowledge it, never apologize, I can never forgive you truly, right? And if I can't, then you can't hate me, and you can't have been so wrong. And so you don't. And for a while it seems to work. But then you realize that somehow, I am not holding you responsible for your cruelties. Nobody is. You've not acknowledged them, and I've found some infuriating way to ignore them and love you past them. And you realize it's not fair. You need it to be fair. It's maddening. It makes no sense.
Reasons to leave.
And now you understand that there is only one way to escape the torture of being forgiven for something awful that you never even apologized for, having sidestepped so many imaginary snares that you've tangled yourself up in your own assumptions and insecurities.
And so
You leave.
