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I like to tell myself: there had to have been something. It can't have been four years of wasted time.
But in reality, what good am I doing myself? You haunt me enough already, without me trying to justify the time I wasted on you as if that would somehow make it hurt less.
You're a sly one. You come from a household with emotionally abusive parents, and you have certainly learnt from the best in the business as a result. Because of your family and their behaviour, everybody considers you to be a victim in your own home, and to an extent they aren't wrong. But when it came to the way you blew up our four year relationship, destroyed our engagement only six months after asking me to marry you, it made it easy for you to play the part of that victim so well.
In four years, you isolated me from any friends I tried to make. At the time, I didn't see it... because I never do. I have ASD and depression and you knew this. I have a history of friendships imploding violently because I had no diagnosis for many years and did not understand how to communicate properly for myself, or how to ask others to communicate clearly in a way I could process, and you knew this, too. You see, my dear, you knew everything about me because I laid my cards out on the table the instant our relationship started. I had already been so beaten down by the world in which I lived and by the "friends" I thought I had made over the years, so convinced of my own broken ineptitude, that I told you free of charge no small number of secrets. You knew, from the beginning, that I struggled with a lot. Which meant you knew, from the beginning... that I'm fairly easy to abuse.
You weren't the first. I hope you'll be the last, but at this point I doubt it. You knew that I was coming hot off the heels of the death of my closest friendship with a very toxic person, somebody who had threatened to kill themselves and had claimed each time that it would partly be my fault if they went through with it. Somebody who also isolated me from all my friends at the time, until they were the only person I had to talk to about anything, no matter what. Funnily enough, at the time we started dating, you were angry with this ex-friend of mine. You hated what they had done to me.
And yet here we are, four years later, and you have done the same down to the letter.
So you see my dear, you are an abusive ghost. I can move on from loving you, that isn't the difficult part. The difficult part is trying to remind myself that I didn't deserve what you did to me. I didn't deserve to be isolated. I didn't deserve your blatant lies. I didn't deserve your insecurity and I didn't deserve your aggression. You played me, and yet every time I caught you doing so, I forgave you in a heartbeat because I loved you more than I've loved anything, and all I ever asked from you was communication and the acknowledgement that what you did was hurtful. Every time, you claimed you wouldn't do it again. That you'd make the effort. That you'd try your best.
I didn't deserve your mistreatment of me.
But that doesn't change the fact that I already had insecurities from people in my life doing the same, in the past. Isolating me from my friends. Dismantling my support network while claiming it was good for me, while telling me that these people I shouldn't talk to were supposedly bad people. Making sure I had no-one and nothing, so that you had an excuse to be upset with me when I had nobody else to turn to. So that you knew I had nobody else when you turned around, looked me in the eye and dared to tell me it was all my fault, that I had somehow been the abusive one to you. How? Had my four years of forgiveness for every time you doubted me, without question of why you would doubt me because we both knew it was your own insecurities about yourself, been abusive? Had it been me simply asking you to communicate with me - the foundation of a relationship, after all, is built on communication - after you ignored me for a little over an entire month? Who knows. You were a dishonest spectre to everybody else, regardless, weren't you?
Because you sold them the lie I was a monster, and how could you possibly be a liar? You, who grew up in an emotionally abusive household completely dead of compassion? How could you be a liar, when you're so caring and sweet? Of course you couldn't be. Not to them - not after you'd taken the steps to make them as distant from me as possible in the first place.
And so here I am now, with nothing but your ghost, and what an abusive ghost it is. Every time I even begin to feel like I might be arguing with somebody, I stop functioning and break down into tears and apologise profusely for hours after the fact, even after I'm told that it's okay. Because it doesn't feel okay. I don't feel okay. Actually, you have taught me that if I feel anything at all for myself, it isn't okay. I'm a prisoner in my own mind, beating myself for every time I'm upset, even when I rationally know I'm allowed to feel that way. How ironic, my dear, that you so bitterly complained about your parents and how invalid they made you feel, and yet you used their very same tactics and you've left me an absolute ruin.
And we both know you don't care. We both know that you know what you have done, and we both know that you're pleased with the outcome.
I don't really understand why you asked to marry me, to be honest. I tell myself: there had to have been something.
But when I look around at the burnt bridges that you set on fire, all while promising me it was for my own good, and when I look in a mirror and I see somebody I hate because you and my close friend before you always told me that everything was my fault, that I was a mistake, that I was a monster for having emotions of my own instead of being an unquestioning slave to your own needs, that I was abusive because I couldn't always be your personal therapist, I have to wonder if it matters whether there was something or not. Because there's nothing left now at all, of anything.