Reverse-Engineered Love
Definitive Rupture
Made me realise
that your (our)
mortgage
on me (us)
was built upon the illusion of certainty.
My love,
the truth
changes
in the instant
that follows
certainty.
Made me realise,
finally,
With a paradoxical, almost unbearable sense of relief,
shattered relief
that,
after all,
yes,
you did love me.
I needed you so much,
I wanted you so much,
and you slowly suffocated…
You became confused,
you had the real substance,
it was real,
and yet you assumed
you had
the placebo,
through reverse engineering,
because
I
made you
believe that.
I dismantled your
belief in the truth,
the truth that you loved me
and chose me.
“If we concentrate too much on what
we want, we don’t really see what is there.”
Definitive rupture
made me realise
that I inherited
the “victimhood of choice” —
that’s what I chose to call it.
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You already loved me,
and I still felt I fell short,
according to the impossibly high standards
I had intangible redefined.
Instead,
I wanted,
even without admitting it to myself,
to be glorified.
I demanded to be loved
so devotedly,
so effortlessly.
What a misalignment of expectations.
You.
You.
As though you had deliberately
chosen someone,
me.
Me, who loved you so intensely
that I idealised you to such an extent,
with such exaggeration,
that you could never possibly measure up.
You had escaped your father’s chronic dissatisfaction,
only to reinvent it.
Perfectly, stupidly, and terribly ingenious.
(Inspired by Nathan Hill’s book Wellness. I recognised myself in it and arrived at this conclusion heuristically while reading it.)
