That so-called hatred, which often doesn’t even go that far, is an easy way out because it simplifies. It takes a whole person, with all their mess, and reduces them to a target. I can’t do that with you. Not out of nobility. But because it would be dishonest with myself, and that’s a lie I can no longer carry.
I don’t have to hate you. I would have reasons if you had pushed me into error on purpose. But even then, before hating you, I would hate myself first. The way the mind does when it wants to punish someone and doesn’t have the courage to admit its own attachment. Anger, in these cases, is just a mask for the shame of still loving and having stumbled.
Love. The word sounds big, I know. That’s why it unsettles. Because it doesn’t fit into the accounting of damage. Because it is older than the last conversation and deeper than the last mistake. The purest feeling has always been greater than our errors, and that’s what keeps me from turning you into a convenient villain.
But there’s a 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 as someone who takes on guilt to keep the story standing. And to this day you don’t acknowledge it. You don’t acknowledge it, or you do and can’t bear to look.
Then you ask me to hate you.
Think about that scene carefully. A person asking for their own judgment, almost begging for a sentence, as if the other’s hatred could put their inner house in order. As if it were easier to be hated than to be seen. Because hatred, at least, has a shape. Love demands responsibility. It demands presence. It demands the courage to remain in the same place when everything in 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 supposed cruelty. And then your mind exhales: “He hates me, so I can go.” It’s an old trick. It works because escape always comes with a beautiful argument. You don’t run away. You leave telling a story that makes the running justifiable.
But I can’t give you that gift.
One afternoon, when I realized I was carrying a weight that wasn’t mine, I stood in the same place for about twenty minutes, unable to name what I was feeling. It wasn’t sadness. It was something quieter. The recognition that I had built an explanation for the other so I wouldn’t have to look at what I had done with my part.
What I feel now has no beauty at all: it’s exhaustion. A clean exhaustion. Not the dramatic kind that turns into a striking phrase. It’s the exhaustion of someone who realizes that turning over the other’s mistakes in their head doesn’t diminish their own. That turning memory into a courtroom doesn’t bring back what was lost, it only prolongs the agony. You don’t give time back by pressing your finger into the wound. You only learn its shape.
I don’t know what weakness you’ve been facing. I have no way to pretend I do. It could be fear of taking responsibility. It could be pride, or a well-trained cowardice that has learned to dress itself as self-preservation. It could simply be the inability to sustain your own image when it cracks. But I know one thing: running hurts more than facing it. It hurts less today. It charges interest tomorrow. And when it comes to collect, it does so in silence, in the middle of the night, in the space between an unsent message and the urge to disappear.
Losing someone you love because it’s hard to deal with yourself is a grotesque reality. It’s like tearing down the house so you don’t have to face the bedroom mirror. I’m here, on the 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. Nor will I hate myself to ease your guilt. I’ll call things by their name, even if that leaves me without shelter for a few days. Because truth has a useful brutality. It isn’t comfortable, but it’s solid. And it’s only on solid ground that we can stand without sinking.
Every time I remember, I catch myself wondering: do you really want me to hate you, or do you want me to stop demanding that we be adults in the face of what we do?
