Don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like the last four years of my life have been stolen from me. The Dark Period. The giant cloud. It’s as if I never had a childhood. All the other kids went outside to play while I stayed home and babied you and fucked you and told you how beautiful you were and put up with your bullshit and watched you cry and watched you change and wondered what it was all about. Isn’t it sad and pathetic? The bittersweet reality that hits you like a brick wall, the sudden awareness.

Love doesn’t exist.

I’ve wasted time, and you’ve wasted it for me. Monday mornings in your bedroom trying to keep quiet, trying not to wake the parents, trying to feel something and laughing uncontrollably. Friday afternoons spent on the phone for hours, listening to you and your blahblahblahblah, trying to calm you down, trying to assure you that everything would be OK when it wouldn’t. If I could I would hop into a time machine and go back to those moments and beat the shit of myself for letting them consume me. They were never worth it.

I don’t want to know you and every little thing about you. I don’t want to know when I’ve said the wrong thing, like now. I don’t want to know when I’ve said the right thing, when I’ve looked at you the right way, when I’ve touched you how you want to be touched… Like now. I don’t want to but I do, it’s been carved into the nooks and crannies of my brain. I don’t love you and I don’t believe I ever did. But I think I’ve been trained to think that I love you, act like I love you.

I told you I can’t explain it.

But I don’t suppose it really matters, don’t suppose you really care. We both know we’re too fucked up to be apart, too fucked up to be with anyone else. Damaged. Scarred. For life, for life. So here is our history: Puppy love from that very first day of eight grade to what might have been genuine love to an unhealthy infatuation to hatehatehate to “lovelovelove” to not knowing what to do anymore to leaving, to always staying, to giving up.

You’ll probably be a teen mom and I’ll probably never be able to hold down a decent job. We’ll live in a small apartment in a bad neighborhood with rats in the cupboards and five screaming kids. You’ll blame me for all of your problems and I’ll say, “Leave me alone you ugly fat bitch,” because you will be. We’ll fuck other people and I’ll pretend like I care when I find out but really, I’ll just find it all very funny. Once we’re older, our children will not care about us anymore and we of course will not care about each other, but I’ll die in your arms whispering, “I love you, I really do,” just because it seems like the right thing to do. We’ll be alone forever but it won’t really matter because we’ll always be together.

I told you I can’t explain it.

But I feel like my past, present, and future, have been stolen from me.