If you must invent a monster, make it my size. Give it my eyes. My voice. My fingerprints. Tell them I was difficult. Tell them I was angry. Tell them I broke things that were already shattered. Tell them whatever story helps you sleep at night. I understand. The truth is a heavy animal. Not everyone is strong enough to drag it home. So if your peace requires fiction, write it. Build yourself a kingdom from edited memories. Replace every blade with a misunderstanding. Every betrayal with self-preservation. Every cruelty with necessity. Go ahead and paint yourself innocent. Paint me guilty. I mean, art has always been about perspective. Hasn’t it? Just don’t mistake your portrait for a mirror. Because somewhere beneath all that fresh paint, the truth is still breathing. Still scratching at the walls and refusing to die. I know what happened. You know what happened. And maybe that is the tragedy. Not that you hurt me. Not even that you left. It’s that somewhere along the way, you decided it was easier to rewrite my character than to read your own. Easier to call me the wounded one rather than admit you were holding the knife. Easier to tell people I was the storm, rather than explain why the house was flooded. So tell them your version. Tell it beautifully. Tell it often. Tell it until it becomes the only story you can remember. If that is what it takes for you to close your eyes at night, then by all means— sleep well. I’ll be over here learning how to live with the truth.

I hope hurting me healed you. I hope the wound you carved into my chest became the doorway to whatever peace you were searching for. I hope the nights you chose yourself over us finally grew quiet. I hope the war inside you found its ending. I hope the running stopped. I hope the ghosts that followed you lost your scent. I hope that everything you took from me— the trust, the innocence, the version of myself that believed love alone could save two people— became enough to purchase the freedom you seemed willing to pay anything for. Even me. And if it did, if my heartbreak became the medicine that finally eased your pain, then I pray you never forget what it cost. Not so that guilt may follow you, but so that gratitude might. I hope you remember that someone once loved you so completely they stood in the fire with you until they realized you were the one holding the match. I hope you remember the hands that reached for you, the heart that made room for you, the soul that carried wounds it did not create simply because it believed you were worth loving through them. And I hope, wherever life takes you, you become the person I kept seeing inside of you. The person I stayed for. The person I forgave before the apology came. The person I lost while trying not to lose you. As for me, I release what happened. I release the questions, the anger, the desperate need to understand why. I cannot carry both my future and the weight of what you did to me. So I set it down here. May hurting me have healed you. May breaking me have freed you. May finding yourself have been worth losing me. And may you never forget that your peace was purchased with pieces of a heart that once loved you without reservation.