Reminiscing...

I threw up, not because I'd drunk too much, but because his hands crawling over my flesh physically repulsed me. I could not cry, because I did not care enough. I left him that night, and I did not feel a single pang of guilt, nor a glimpse of loss. I did not doubt for a minute that what I'd done was the right thing. I felt nothing but relief.

It wasn't him that hurt me, but part of me had died, and he was not the person to fix me. In fact, his affection only deepened the wound, reminded me of what I had once felt and was never going to feel with him, sickened me to the stomach that I was living in this farce, smiling and laughing and pretending it was all roses, when all it was was pretence.

Sometimes, I could close my eyes and pretend it wasn't him. That was what kept me going for so long, and possibly the sole reason I stayed as long as I did. I knew on the first meeting that it wasn't right, that nothing would ever come of it. All my hopes had dispersed on that first rendez-vous. I was his Juliet, he was my stop-gap.

Instead of playing love songs in my car on the way home, I played the saddest songs I could find. Instead of longing for his calls, I dreaded and resented them.

It was when he declared that he was more in love than he had ever been, or ever would be, that I knew I would never love him, if I had not known it before.

Yet I remained, in hope that things might change, that I might someday grow to love him. Because someone needed to heal the scars.

I had stopped caring about myself, about the way in which I was treated, used, abused. I would have preferred the latter to being treated like a princess. I wanted passion, emotion, love - but none existed within me at that time, and nothing could have sparked it. The fires inside me had burned too brutally, too intensely, for me to love again.

And so I royally fucked him over, like a thief in the night, without so much as a tear shed in either guilt, regret or doubt; and I hated him for his acceptance and kindness, and his contact and glances and even his existence, because in spite of his thorough decency, he was a man I never either loved or wanted, and he made me see a side of myself I did not want to acknowledge.