Left on Read
Maybe I was the problem all along.
I fucking fell for it.
And I don’t think he did it with malicious intent.
That’s almost worse.
It’s pretty clear the man has also been in survive-by-any-means-necessary mode for a long time.
Just as I thought I was starting to make some real progress reconstructing myself out of the ashes of my previous lives, he arrived and gave me what I thought was hope.
Loneliness is a funny thing.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It gets into the cracks and waits.
Then one day something touches the wrong place and the whole structure goes.
The implosion was sudden and violent.
The collapses bring the questions I swore off.
Was it really that bad.
Did I make a mistake.
Did I destroy the only place I was needed.
Then the ugly conversation starts.
The board of directors in my head assembling around the table again. Same men. Same evidence. Same verdict prepared before I’ve even opened my mouth.
I miss my husband.
There it is.
He was and is many things.
Violent.
Tender.
Controlling.
Generous.
Fractured.
Loving.
Unsafe.
But at least I meant something to him.
At least my absence registered.
I know how ugly that sounds.
I know what people want me to say.
They want the clean survivor script.
He hurt me. I left. I healed.
Fuck that.
I don’t have that story.
I have this one.
I spent years starving inside that marriage before I finally left it.
Not just sexually.
Intimately.
I stopped letting him touch the soft places because every soft place had become evidence. Every need could be used. Every act of wanting him gave him another door into me.
So I withheld.
I called it survival.
Maybe it was.
Maybe survival still leaves you with a body that doesn’t know how to be held.
After I left, the vacuum stayed.
It didn’t care that I had done the right thing.
It didn’t care that leaving had saved my life.
It sat there.
Open.
Hungry.
I tried to fill it the obvious way.
Strangers.
Beds.
Hands.
Mouths.
Men I could leave before morning.
Sex that asked nothing and gave less.
Nothing touched it.
Nothing.
Because a starving man will eat shit if it’s all there is.
That was the first realisation.
Not beautiful.
Not redemptive.
Just fact.
Starvation changes what you can bear to swallow.
Then Lukas arrived in the middle of it.
Kind.
Gentle.
Soft in the right places.
Masculine without making me flinch.
He listened.
He noticed things.
Small things.
Too small to defend myself against.
The first night he stayed in my bed he fell asleep holding me like survival depended on it.
I barely moved.
I remember lying there in the dark thinking: oh no.
That was the second realisation.
Not love.
Danger.
I knew it before I admitted it.
Something had latched.
Something stupid and starving and ashamed had found warmth and called it safety.
Big dumb romantic foolish broken heart welded to him before I could stop it.
I hate the speed of it.
I hate the lack of dignity in hunger.
We both needed it.
That is the most honest sentence I have.
Two broken men.
Not saving each other.
Using each other to breathe.
I don’t mean that cruelly.
I don’t think either of us meant harm.
That’s the part I keep choking on.
Harm doesn’t need malice.
Its now five months later.
We’re doing what broken people do.
Vaguesly responding to abstract questions.
Hearing accusation where there was fear.
Hearing rejection where there was fatigue.
Hearing abandonment in ordinary delay.
A sentence landed wrong.
A reply came late.
A tone changed.
He pulled back.
I noticed immediately.
That’s the humiliation.
The speed.
The speed at which I knew.
No more “morning Mr.”
No more Tuesday mate-date nights.
No more him messaging first.
Nothing I could hold up in court.
Nothing I could accuse him of without sounding insane.
Just less.
Less warmth.
Less reach.
Less him.
That was the third realisation.
I would have preferred cruelty.
A clean no.
A door closed hard enough to bruise.
Anything but this slow reduction.
Anything but being taught to wait.
Then came my birthday.
Twenty five people invited.
One Reply
Sorry mate, can’t make it.
One.
I keep coming back to that number like it explains something about me.
One.
Forty four years old and one person bothered to answer.
That day something in me went very quiet.
Not dramatic.
Not theatrical.
Quiet in the way a room gets quiet after the decision has already been made.
Lukas saw it.
Maybe not all of it.
Enough.
He knew I was close to making the choice that cannot be unchosen.
So he stepped in.
He made sure I had an incredible birthday.
Not expensive.
Not grand.
Present.
He made me feel seen.
There’s the stupid word.
Seen.
I had already told myself friendship was all there was.
I had accepted it.
Or I had performed acceptance well enough to fool myself.
Then he was kind again.
That was the fourth realisation.
Kindness can be devastating.
Kindness can do damage when it arrives after starvation.
I broke my own heart again.
Nobody did it to me.
I did it.
I watched myself do it.
The next day it was gone again.
That is the part I can’t get past.
The next day.
Gone.
No “morning Mr.”
No first message.
No Tuesday.
No explanation.
Then left on read.
That small, pathetic, humiliating phrase.
Left on read.
It shouldn’t be able to do this much damage.
It does.
It did.
I sat there staring at the screen like an idiot.
Like a child.
Like a man trying to find blood in a stone.
I kept checking.
Then hating myself for checking.
Then checking again.
That was the fifth realisation.
I had become ridiculous.
Not in love.
Ridiculous.
Reduced.
Begging without words.
Trying to extract proof of my value from a message bubble.
I don’t know what’s real.
That is the agony.
Not heartbreak. Confusion.
Was I loved.
Was I useful.
Was I temporary.
Was I comfort.
Was I too much.
Did he mean it when he held me.
Did I invent the rest.
Did he pull away because he saw me clearly.
Or because he saw himself.
I keep trying to locate the exact second I became unbearable.
There must be one.
There has to be one.
A word.
A look.
A need too visible.
A hunger too exposed.
Some moment where he thought: no.
Pretty words mean nothing without understanding the emotion that gives them agency.
That sentence keeps returning because it’s the only clean instrument I have.
Anybody can say beautiful things.
Anybody can be gentle for a night.
Anybody can give a drowning man one lungful of air.
Consistency is the cost.
Presence is the cost.
Return is the cost.
And I am tired of paying for other people’s almost.
I’m still in it.
That’s the problem.
I’m writing from the centre of it.
Not after.
Not wiser.
Not healed.
I’m inside the thing while it’s still happening.
Still checking.
Still waiting.
Still ashamed.
Still missing Bryen.
Still wanting Lukas.
Still furious at both of them.
Still more furious at myself.
I keep thinking: maybe Bryen was the last person who will ever need me like that.
Then I hate myself for thinking it.
Then I think it again.
That’s where I am.
On the floor of my own life with the lights off.
Trying to sob quietly because even grief feels embarrassing now.
Trying not to turn one man’s silence into a final verdict on my existence.
Trying not to make a shrine out of the first person who held me gently after years of impact.
Trying not to crawl back toward damage just because damage once knew my name.
I fucking fell for it.
That’s all.
That’s the whole autopsy.
I was starving.
He was kind.
I mistook relief for rescue.
Now the relief is gone.
And I am left with the hunger.
Still here.
Still hungry.
Still ashamed of what I would have eaten just to stop feeling empty.