I don't have to hate you. I would have reasons if you'd pushed me into error on purpose, as already happens in certain human stories that repeat themselves with different faces and the same script. But even then, before hating you, I'd hate myself first, the way the mind does when it wants to punish someone and lacks the courage to admit its own attachment.
Sometimes anger is just a mask for the shame of still loving and having stumbled.
The word sounds big, I know, but that's exactly why it unsettles. Because it doesn't fit inside any accounting of damage. Because it's older than the last conversation and deeper than the last offense. The purest feeling was always greater than our mistakes, and that's what keeps me from turning you into a convenient villain. But there's one detail that cuts: your mistake was yours, not mine. I lived for a long time under its weight as if it were mine. I carried the consequence like someone taking on a guilt in order to keep the story standing. And to this day, you still don't acknowledge it. Either you don't acknowledge it, or you do and can't bear to look at it.
Then you ask me to hate you. Think about that scene carefully. One person asking for their own judgment, almost begging for a sentence, as if the other person's hatred could set the inside of the house in order. As if it were easier to be hated than to be seen and heard. Because hate, at least, has a shape. Love demands responsibility. It demands presence. It demands the courage to remain in the same place when everything inside you wants to run.
Maybe you'd feel more comfortable if I hated you, because then you'd gain a simple explanation for your leaving. You wouldn't have to face your weakness, only my “cruelty.” And then your mind breathes: “He hates me, so I can go.” It's an old trick. And it works. It works because escape always comes wrapped in a beautiful argument. That's what escapism is: you don't run away merely by running, you run away by telling a story that makes the running seem justified.
But I can't give you that gift.
I look at all this and feel something that has no beauty to it at all: exhaustion. A clean kind of exhaustion. Not the dramatic kind that turns into a post or a striking phrase. It's the exhaustion of someone who realizes that replaying the other person's mistakes in your head doesn't lessen your own. More than that: turning memory into a courtroom doesn't bring back what was lost, it only prolongs the agony. You don't recover time by pressing your finger into the wound. You only learn its shape.
I don't know what kind of weakness I've been dealing with these past months. I can't pretend I do. It may be fear of admitting it, pride, or some well-trained cowardice that's learned to dress itself up as “self-preservation.” It may simply be the inability to sustain one's own self-image once it cracks. But I know one thing with certainty: running away and pretending reality hurts more than facing it head-on. It hurts less today, but it charges interest tomorrow. And when it comes to collect, it collects in silence, in the middle of the night, in the interval between an unsent message and the desire to disappear.
Losing someone you love because it's hard to deal with yourself is a grotesque reality. It's like knocking the house down so you don't have to face the bedroom mirror. And I'm here, outside, watching the dust rise, trying to decide whether I shout, whether I wait, whether I leave, or whether I accept that some people prefer the fire to the conversation.
What I can offer you is this, without pose: I won't hate you to make your escape easier. I won't hate myself either to ease your guilt. I'll call things by their proper names, even if that leaves me without shelter for a few days. Because in the end, truth has a useful brutality to it: it isn't comfortable, but it's solid, and one day you understand that it's only on solid ground that we can stand without sinking.
Now tell me, without defense and without theater: do you really want me to hate you… or do you want me to stop demanding that you be an adult with yourself and with me in the face of what you did?
