i love you, but i have a final exam coming up
you are no more than a part of me i had to leave behind.
i know you don’t stay with girls who carry too much, because you already know how it ends — you become the first thing they loosen their grip on and slips out of their already trembling hands just to make space for everything else. and it’s almost cruel how accurate that is, how i stand here proving you right without even trying, because since way before i met you, i am one of those girls.
and i could say i’m sorry, but that would be a lie that tastes too clean and insincere. i told you, didn’t i? over and over, that i would eventually leave — at three in the afternoon when the sun feels too heavy on the skin, or three hours past midnight when thoughts rot louder than sleep. i told you i would leave when everything started collapsing and when even holding myself together felt like forcing bones back into place with bare hands. i said it more than enough times that it should have settled into all of your senses already, yet you chose to look at it like a challenge instead of a warning.
so you stayed.
with the raw, hurting belief that love should be loud enough to drown everything else out, you stayed. that if you begged hard enough, if you unraveled yourself in front of me in just the right way, i would give everything up and choose you. and maybe that’s what ruins it the most — making me feel needed exactly when i had nothing left to give. when i was already splitting at the seams, already trying to keep my own life from slipping through my fingers, you decided i should hold you too, as if i were built to carry both of us that easily.
if this is how you define love: a frantic, suffocating thing that even at the crucial moment where you’re already losing your mind, you still need to perform care for someone else — then i don’t want it. i don’t want a love that feels like being dragged in the deepest pit of hell. i don’t want to study for my final exam with one eye on my future and the other on whether a boy beside me is falling apart again. i don’t want to keep stitching you back together while i am already coming undone.
i told you i love you, and i meant it, but just not in the way you wanted me to mean it. not in a way that would let me destroy myself just to prove it true. not in a way that would have me sit in a failing room, watching my future collapse just so you wouldn’t feel alone in yours. i love you, but i am not foolish enough to confuse sacrifice with self-erasure, to call drowning devotion. you keep reaching for me like i am something that can fix you, like if i stay long enough you will finally feel whole. but in return, all i feel is the slow pull downward, the excruciating drag into something deeper and darker where nothing grows, and everything just sinks with flowers of regrets in their hands. it’s all pitch black down there that it would feel so much better if i instantly die instead.
Get tales of the taleteller’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
i met you while i was still trying to become someone. and you came into my life already carrying the weight of everything you refused to resolve, already looking for somewhere to put it down. and somehow, it became me. piece by piece, conversation by conversation, you started pressing that weight into my hands, my chest, and into the fragile spaces in my ribcage i was still trying to build for myself. and i saw it right then, that if i stayed, i wouldn’t just love you. i would become you — oh, god, i know for myself i would imitate the same exhaustion and ruin you are carrying today, because my subconscious would believe that’s just how things work.
so i left. finally.
and you can pretend your whole life you didn’t see it coming, but i handed you the ending so many times it should have felt familiar by now. you’re not a little boy anymore, and mind me if i tell you, you’re not as lost as in the way you think you are. you just keep choosing not to look at the damage you leave behind, because it’s easier to believe someone else abandoned you than to admit you made it impossible to stay.
know that i am young, but not naive to be guilt-tripped so casually by someone like you.
i am not your place to unload what you refuse to heal. i am not the soft surface where all your early twenties’ regrets get laid to rest. i am not your second attempt at fixing a life you already mishandled. you don’t get to carve your past into me and call it love nor to reshape me into something that makes your own mistakes easier to bear. let me make mine. let me ruin things on my own and learn how to live with them without inheriting yours.
everything you keep trying to teach me — the pain, the discipline, the idea that suffering is the only way to grow — none of that feels like guidance. it feels like you are only trying to pass down a life you didn’t survive properly, hoping i will carry it better than you did. but i won’t. i refuse to live as your correction nor your redemption nor your quiet attempt at rewriting everything that went wrong before i was even born.
perhaps, there’s a part of me that aches for the version of you that needed someone, the version i never met — the one that might have been softer and easier to love without this constant weight of pressure to quickly transition from a child to a grown-up. but i cannot go back and be that person for you, and i will not become someone as broken just to make up for it now.
i don’t want to be raised by your wounds only to realize they were coagulating walls around me the entire time, forming a stable fibrin so i could exist only in ways that don’t threaten your own bleeding skin.
i love you, but not in a way that costs me myself, not in a way that makes me smaller. i love you, but not more than my quiet, hurting desire to be someone who reached her dreams in this lifetime. i love you, but i still have to study for my final exam.
