I was thirteen. I was naïve and even a bit reckless. I lusted after boys and you were even one of them. Then I had you, and it was like a dream come true. You were everything I thought that I needed. Until you weren’t.
I didn’t notice it right away, but slowly, the sappy outer shell of your wall began to crack and eventually the broken shards cascaded down around me, some piercing my skin as they fell. I learned that your love came at a price, and a steep one at that. You regulated everything that I did and molded me into the person you wanted your girlfriend to be, but a person that was unrecognizable to me. It came to the point that I needed you. Because I didn’t know who I was without you.
For five years, I let you walk all over me and tell me how to live my life, always abiding by your rules because I feared the consequences. More than your consequences, I feared being alone and you knew it. In fact, you thrived off of it. You thought of me as just a stupid pawn in your game, a game that I didn’t want to play anymore. But all the while, you laced your poison with the sweet words of a lover. I love you. I’m nothing without you. You are perfect to me. You found a way to ease all of my insecurities while slowly making me into your puppet. I became more like your puppy than your girlfriend; faithful and loyal, even when you came back with the stench of another puppy woven into the threads of your clothes. I patiently awaited my turn for your love while watching you fall for other girls, even though I was first in line. When it was finally my turn again, you wanted my whole life to be about you and what you wanted, like I was the one who had done something wrong and betrayed your trust.
My family told me to leave. The few friends that I had left told me that this wasn’t normal, and that I needed to get out. But you had consumed my life. I told them that I was fine, I even said that I was happy. Finally, when I couldn’t take being kept prisoner any longer, I broke my chains and ran. And I never looked back.
I distinctly remember walking down the cobblestone walkway the next day and feeling like a bird -- I was finally free from your wrought-iron cage and could fly in any direction that I chose. I put on make-up that day to prove that I was free from your reigns- you couldn’t tell me that I wasn’t allowed to wear it anymore. In fact, all of the activities that you said I couldn’t partake in were suddenly at the top of my to-do list because I was actually allowed to do them without the fear of your persecution.
I was the lucky one out of the two of us though, because while I have to deal with the loss of someone who didn’t love me, you have to deal with the heart-shattering loss of someone who would have moved mountains and parted oceans just to be with you. You have to deal with the guilt of knowing that you broke the person that had so much love to give. You also get the pain of knowing that I didn’t need you to put me back together again. I am finally figuring myself out. I finally know who I am.
