Why Are You Still Here? I Hate You, I Told You To Leave ((I Still Need You)) in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

You’re a terrible friend, the worst friend I’ve ever had. You’re toxic; a poison that is always inside my head and clawing through my veins, always inside me, trying to destroy me from the inside until I cave in on myself. You’re always there, you never leave.

I have done everything I can to tell myself I don’t need you, I don’t like you, I don’t want you in my life. From the outside, I am sure that everyone believes me when I say I stopped listening to you a long time ago. I’m flippant, nonchalant. From the outside I look fine. Better than fine. Healthy. Normal. All the things you never wanted me to be. From the outside you can’t see the decay that I am always holding in; if you cut me open the blackness will bleed out like a black hole reduced to liquid, if I cut myself open I will be letting you out, letting you win, I won’t do it. I won’t do it but all I can hear is your voice.

It’s gone on long enough, your voice says. Look at what you’ve become. Your voice, a mosquito whine.

I don’t want to hear it, I’m closing my eyes against you but that shattered-light blackness behind my eyelids won’t save me because you’re still inside me with your insidious whispers and your ever-present hatred.

I’m breathing too fast and too hard, that panic that wraps itself cold and close around my windpipe, I want you here with me and still I know that that is the wrong thing to want, I’m trying so hard to convince myself I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it because I am better without you. I’m a better fiancee, a better employee, a better friend, all the time that you are not in my life. I know that, most of the time.

And yet the world without you seems like a dark place; the barren empty plain of the desert at night, so far to go without your hand to hold. I need you because nobody knows me better than you know me. You ARE me. You are part of me and without you I do not know who I am.

With you, there is certainty. There is pain and fear and self-loathing, there is loneliness and anger and frustration, there is the constant, CONSTANT feeling of never getting it right, never going far enough, never being quite able to leave the world behind and just throw myself into your traitorous arms and let us fall together into the abyss.

With you, I KNOW all of these things. With you there are scars on my arms and furious rifts between myself and everyone who cares about me. With you there are days when I can’t get out of bed. With you there are swollen red eyes and thoughts of suicide.

With you there are things I can see, can feel, can hold on to. Every bone, every hard line of my body. I crave them like an addict in withdrawal, shaky and afraid. I crave you. All I can do is ride it out, crying and rocking like a crack whore, hoping that tomorrow I will feel better able to ignore all the things you say.

Last updated October 24, 2014