21 Letters – #15 Christian
(a letter to the woman who loved the wreckage)
you came to me
in the smoke
after the fire.
and for a moment,
i thought you were rescue.
i mistook your shadow
for shelter.
your touch
for safety.
but you were just
another match
disguised as mercy.
i handed you the little
i had rebuilt
with trembling fingers,
a home made of cracked beams and open wounds,
walls I’d put back together
with threadbare hope
and the ache of everything I’d already lost.
and you…
you looked at it
with disdain,
and tore it down
to build your own version
of love.
one with no room for me.
you were right, you know –
there is resentment.
boiling under the floorboards
of the hardest days of my life,
when the world turned black
and i couldn’t breathe
from the inside out.
while I was slipping under,
you handed me stones,
not rope.
i needed someone to hold me
while my universe disappeared
but you chose to watch
with cold, detached eyes,
deciding you didn’t want that kind of burden.
you turned away.
you found someone else
to whisper lies to
while i sat in the silence
you left behind.
and god,
that woman ...
the one who meant nothing to you.
how do you betray someone
for a body
you couldn’t even respect?
how do you look into eyes
filled with love
and lie,
knowing you never saw a future
in the one you destroyed yours for?
it wasn’t just infidelity.
it was erasure.
it was the annihilation
of everything sacred.
of me.
you taught me
that empathy
without boundaries
is a kind of suicide.
that hope,
unmatched,
will kill you slowly
as you try to resuscitate
someone who never wanted to live right
in the first place.
i saw you, Christian,
desperate to be saved
but hell-bent on sinking.
you became the pilot
of our flight
and when the alarms went off
and I begged you to pull up,
you locked the cockpit
and smiled
as we plummeted.
you killed us on purpose.
you were never trying to fly.
you just didn’t want to fall alone.
and now,
you want friendship?
after the wreckage,
after the twisted metal
and unrecognizable body
of who I used to be?
even if i broke every rule
i made for myself,
even if i reached back
into the wreckage
to pull you out,
you are not the kind of woman
i would ever choose again.
not in love.
not in loyalty.
not in any form of truth.
you said your father
burned everything he touched,
turned beauty to ash.
you feared becoming him.
and then you did.
you self-sabotaged
with surgical precision,
destroyed what was good,
tore the love from my chest
and tossed it aside
because it made you feel
too seen.
i am healing.
but not into a woman
who ever looks at you the same.
you will be
a ghost
in the wreckage.
a name i flinch at,
a lesson written
in fire and blood.
thank you,
i guess,
for showing me
what happens
when you stay too long
trying to pull someone,
someone who was always
the lightning,
away from the storm.
i know now
you have to let them drown
before they take you with them.
and so,
this is my last word.
there is no return flight.
burn in your own wreckage.
i’m walking away
from the crash
alive.