"That was how you found me."
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the sound I heard when I was 9 and my father slammed the front door so hard behind him I swear to god it shook the whole house. For the next 3 years I watched my mother break her teeth on vodka bottles. I think she stopped breathing when he left. I think part of her died. I think he took her heart with him when he walked out. Her chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s all the blood in the sink. It’s the night that I spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my sister was going to be okay, after the boy she loved, told her he didn’t love her anymore. It’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. So much blood.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the time that I had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fvcked his ex. I swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks. I think when you love someone, it never really goes away.
It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the six weeks we had a substitute in English because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. When she came back she was smiling. But her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. And sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. I got an A in English that year. I think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays.
It’s not that I don’t love you. Most days I think I don’t, though some days I think I do — I really wouldn’t know, because most of the time I don’t even get myself right. Clearly, all these rejections have taken its toll on what small confidence I have.
It's not that I don't love you. I'm not the same anymore. I'll admit; a lot of shit got to me. I feel like I am losing myself. I'm currently in the long and confusing process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do with my life. There are days when I'll cry and you don't know why so in the end you would be so frustrated and sad because you wouldn’t understand, because you never knew what it feels like to have the sadness running in your blood.
It's not that I don't love you. I just didn’t want to drag you into the mess of me, because unlike the others before you, you had never once experienced what it was like to have even the tiniest inklings of the lonely and broken feelings I get everyday. But that isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t. it’s a beautiful, beautiful good thing. It’s a good thing that I see in you the me that I was before. With you I can temporarily be the me i was before. But it could never happen in the long-run, because this is who I am now, whether I like it or not.
It's not that I don't love you. It's just that I'm a coward who didn’t know what she wanted and didn’t know who she was. But you saw me when no one else did, loved me when no one else would — not even myself.
It's not that I don't love you. It’s that I do.