[the truth]

at a certain point, he realised he couldn't cope with it. i understand his decision, i really do. i understand it even at the time. but it didn't make it hurt any less.

how can you do this to me? i kept asking when we sat on his bedroom floor and talked, as we sat there for hours one saturday afternoon breaking up. you let me be myself, you encouraged me to let you see how terrible i felt inside, you let me get more and more sad and hysterical, and now that i'm as low as i'm ever going to be, you're leaving me.

that's right, he said. he couldn't lie. he told me he thought he could handle it, but he couldn't. he thought a lot of things. he never meant to hurt me.

i didn't, at the time, say to him that he loved watching me get hysterical, got off on it, enjoyed the mis en sc��ne, the emotional rawness. i didn't say it because i didn't have to. it was obvious. he was always telling me that my purity, my complete inability to mask my sense of horror, was what he loved about me most. it was like he didn't understand that those qualities, at least in me, were a pathology. my rawness was not in any way about purity - it was about depression. yes, there was a certain beautiful honesty to my depressed state - i miss it now. i miss having a little stake in maintaining the status quo that i could walk out of rooms in tears at times that other people would have deemed inapproriate. i liked that about myself. i liked that disregard for convention. and he, well, he loved it.

but it was sick, sicker than even he knew at first. the purity turned into perversity. it turned not into just an awareness of the darkness, but a morbid obsession with it. and as soon as he figured that out, he bolted. he left me alone with my depression, having exhausted him and every other last resort i had.

July 21, 2005 - 10:52 pm