the reflection of someone who left

I desperately wished you hadn't gone there. I wished, on every dying star, that you hadn't, because I knew that would be the last time. The last time I would allow you to tear me apart. The last of the tears I'd cry over you. The last time I'd see the ghost of you roaming the halls.

I wish I hadn't felt it in my bones, as my heart began to collapse. Maybe that was just the side-effect, the side-effect that comes before the cure. But the breakthrough felt like collapsing and the heartache like a sickly disease. Through it all, as I began recovering the parts of me that left with you, the cure felt so far beyond me. A distant desire running from my grieving hands. After the war of dependence, the one I had fought against you, the catastrophe showed itself. The collision was heavy and destructive, ruining the mansion I had worked so hard to build. Now the floorboards creak and the doors fall off their hinges.

For so long, I loathed what your departure had fostered. A version of me I hadn't met before, like a stranger you pass by on your morning run for coffee. That one stranger that gazes back at you for a split second, but then becomes anonymous again. That's how I had felt, right after the fall of my mansion. After the fall of that version of myself, the version I once knew. The version of myself that appealed to every reality you cultivated, every false hope, every deep sigh. Perhaps, leaving was what I needed. The closer I inched towards it, towards the desire of escapism, the closer I felt to myself. So maybe, after the side-effects, I only grew closer to who I was before the fall.

I'm my own cure.