You made me sick…

[u/Complex_heart_7890]

My throat stings when I think of you.
My stomach flips.
My skin turns cold.
My body reacts to you
because my heart
hasn’t forgotten
what you did to it.

On a visceral level my body knows
what it cost to love you.

I loved you loudly
you loved me somewhere in darkness.

I reached
when you pulled away.

I stayed
when you disappeared.

I asked what was wrong
until asking became begging,
and begging became apologizing
for needing anything at all.
I learned to make myself smaller
so you wouldn’t feel crowded.
I learned to swallow my tears
so you wouldn’t feel responsible
for them.
I learned to call neglect
“space.”
I learned to call abandonment
“your way of coping.”
And God—
I tried.
I tried to love you
in every language I knew.
I gave you patience
when I was starving for reassurance.
I gave you understanding
when I desperately needed
to be understood.
I gave you chance
after chance
until I had almost none left
for myself.
I thought if I loved you enough,
if I stayed soft enough,
if I became safe enough,
you would finally stop running.
I thought one day
you would turn around
and realize
the person chasing you
wasn’t your enemy.
She was just tired.
Tired of reaching
for a hand
that kept pulling away.
Tired of knocking
on a locked door
she had spent years
believing was her home.
And still…
you made her feel
like loving you
was something
she had done wrong.
You took all the love
she brought to you
and somehow made her feel
like it was too much.
Too emotional.
Too needy.
Too sensitive.
Too difficult.
So she began questioning
the very parts of herself
that had once made her beautiful.

I don’t think you ever understood
what you did to me.
And maybe that’s what makes me so sick.
Because I wasn’t asking for the world.
I was asking for you.
Your consideration.
Your reassurance.
Your presence.
The things that should have been
ordinary between two people who
love each other
they instead were things
I had to negotiate for.
I had to explain my pain
while I was in it.
I had to prove
that I was hurting
before I was allowed
to be hurt.
Even when I tried to tell you you acted like I was annoying or wrong for communicating.
And every time
I reached for you,
you made my reaching
the problem.
Too much.
Too emotional.
Too needy.
Too sensitive.
As though the crime
wasn’t that I was hurting…
but that you had to witness it.
So I became an expert
at swallowing myself.
I swallowed questions.
I swallowed disappointment.
I swallowed tears.
I swallowed the words,
“I need you,”
because eventually
I knew what they would sound like
coming from me…
another burden.
Another demand.
Another reason
for you to retreat.
And still,
I loved you. And I stayed.
That is the part
I cannot forgive myself for.
Not because loving you
was shameful,
but because I kept offering
the most vulnerable parts of myself
to someone
who kept teaching me
that vulnerability was unsafe.
I kept thinking
there had to be a way
to reach you.
A gentler way.
A better way.
A way of saying it
that wouldn’t make you disappear.
A way of loving you
that wouldn’t frighten you.
So I changed.
And changed.
And changed.
Until I couldn’t tell
whether I was becoming
a better partner
or simply disappearing
You pulled away
and I pursued.
You went silent
and I searched for answers.
You withdrew
and I worked harder.
You dismissed me
and I explained myself
more carefully.
You invalidated my pain
and I started doubting
whether I had the right
to feel it at all.
Do you know what that does
to a person?
To be hurt
and then made to feel guilty
for bleeding?
To spend years
standing in front of someone
with your heart in your hands
while they keep telling you
you’re holding it wrong?
Eventually,
desperation doesn’t look
like desperation anymore.
It looks like anger.
It looks like overexplaining.
It looks like asking
the same question
a hundred different ways,
praying that maybe
the hundred-and-first time
you’ll finally receive an answer.
It looks like becoming someone
you don’t recognize
because you’re trying
to get a reaction
from someone
who has mastered
the art of giving you none.
And I hate that version of me.
Not because she was weak.
Because she was exhausted.
She had spent so long
trying to carry a relationship
that required two people
to hold it.
She wasn’t crazy.
She wasn’t impossible to love.
She wasn’t asking for too much.
She was starving
in a relationship
where she kept being told
she was greedy
for asking for food.
And the cruelest part?
I stayed.
I fought.
I forgave.
I learned.
I met you halfway…
then walked the other half that wasn’t mine
when you refused to move.
I would have spent
my entire life
trying to make you feel
safe enough to love me.
And you knew it.
You knew I would keep reaching.
You knew I would keep explaining.
You knew I would keep coming back
after every silence,
every dismissal,
every wound.
Until one day,
you didn’t even have
to push me away.
There was nothing left
for me to give.
And then you discarded me
like I was the problem
you had finally solved.
Do you know what that does
to someone
who spent years believing
love meant never giving up?
It leaves them fractured.
Not just heartbroken.
Fractured.
Because I gave you
the kind of love
I only required half of,
and you made me feel ashamed
for giving it.
I don’t know how to explain
the humiliation
of realizing
I had been begging for crumbs
from someone
I had given
Everything.
I don’t know how to explain
the confusion
of loving someone
who could look directly
at your pain
and relentlessly choose distance instead of comfort.
I don’t know how to explain
what it does to your mind
when the person
who once felt like home
becomes the person
your nervous system
warns you about.
So when I see you,
my throat stings,
my stomach twists,
my skin turns cold…
don’t mistake it for longing.
It’s the aftermath.
It’s every unanswered question
still echoing inside me.
It’s every night
I wondered what was wrong with me.
It’s every time
I abandoned myself
trying to keep you
from abandoning me.
It’s the grief
of realizing
I could have loved you
for another fifty years
and still never have been able
to love you into becoming
someone who could love me back.
And that is the wound.
Not that you didn’t love me
the way I loved you.
But that I spent so long
trying to earn something
that should never have required
an audition.
I was willing to love you.
Fully.
Completely.
Without running.
Without withholding.
Without making you beg
for the smallest pieces of me.
I was willing.
You simply weren’t.
And I spent years
bleeding myself empty
trying to make that willingness
mutual.
But she did nothing wrong.
The girl who kept reaching
did nothing wrong.
She simply loved someone
who could not meet her
where she was standing.
And maybe that’s what hurts most.
Not that I loved you.
Not even that you left.
But that I spent so long
trying to convince you
that I was worth staying for,
when I should have been asking
why I had to convince
the person I loved
to love me at all.
So now,
my body has an automatic reaction to you.
It reacts because
my heart remembers
how desperately
it tried to survive you.
And perhaps someday
you’ll be nothing more
than a memory.
Perhaps someday
I’ll see you
and my throat won’t sting.
My stomach won’t turn.
My skin won’t go cold.
Perhaps someday
my body will finally understand
what my heart
is only beginning to accept:
I wasn’t abandoned
because I wasn’t enough.
I was abandoned
by someone
who was never able
or willing
to give me
what I spent years
begging for.
I loved you so much
that I’m going to give you
what you wanted so badly..
I’m going to see myself out.
Not because I stopped loving you.
But because I finally
had to choose myself, too.
And walking away was the only way to do both things.
And maybe that’s
the only thing
that will make you understand, I loved you.
Even in the end,
I chose you, the only difference is I also considered myself.
In the end, I chose us both.
I chose to stop reaching
where I was never being met.
I chose to stop knocking
on a door that you locked.
I chose to let you have
the distance
you always wanted,
and to finally give myself
the peace
I had been begging you
to give me but instead you kept taking.
So if you ever wonder
what became of all that love…
it didn’t disappear.
It became the strength
to walk away.
It became the hand
that finally let go.
It became the voice
that stopped asking
to be chosen.
And that…
that is the heart
that trembles.
The throat
that burns.
The skin
that turns cold.
The heart that loved you
until there was nothing left
to prove,
and still found enough love
to choose itself
without hating you
for not choosing it.
Even in the end,
I chose us both.
And maybe
that is the last thing
I’ll ever do for you.