I think I hate him. I do. I can’t be sure if it’s a pattern of my dysfunctional personality, but I feel a negative feeling toward him. He is crass, he is brute, he treats me like I’m invisible, and that I’m never good enough. I hate him – and once upon a time, I might have cared how he felt, but today, I don’t fucking give a shit.

I’ll freely talk to anyone I want. I’ll do what I want – who gives a fuck what he thinks. It’s not like he gives two hoots about what I think. You think he cares about me? Fuck him. Go to hell. All he cares about is himself. How did it come to this point? I don’t know, and don’t even fucking care anymore. The fact that I am starting to notice other guys is just my bodily reaction to how I’m quickly leaving the relationship and not really caring what the fuck he’s doing anymore.

Love is one of those words that changes its meaning throughout the course of your life, and possibly even throughout the course of your day. It’s just that fickle piecing of four letters that one moment can mean so much, and in another, so little. People say romantic love and platonic love are different, but give it enough time, they start to be indistinguishable. Like two blondes after a few drinks. Sometimes, as love runs its course, you may feel like platonic love is more valuable than romantic love. Because, so much significance is tagged onto the semantic field of romantic love. Puppy love, roses, rose-colored glasses, the One, that feeling in your belly. One day, if you wake up and there’s a feeling in your belly, it’s probably something you ate or didn’t eat. That’s all there is to it.

Romantic love, like its famous motif the rose, has an expiration date.

“No matter what you do, you’ll always run into the same problem. It’s you.” There are some things that people say that you just can’t forget, because they are such powerful statements of who you are, what you are worth, and sometimes, those few words packed into an emotion-filled, intense sentence just get stuck in your head. Over the past 2 years, every time something has gone wrong, that sentence would pop up in my head.

“It’s you.”

“It’s you.”

“It’s you.”

It’s like a sore that just won’t go away. It’s like no matter how hard I try, I’m doomed to fail, because of some innate flaw. It’s never enough – I can never change the situation. It’s an awfully cruel goodbye gift, don’t you think? Perhaps that’s what hurts the worst, the fact that after fucking with my head for years; he deals a final blow, so powerful and potent, that its effect is still felt 2 years later. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself; I have a tendency toward self-pity, but this surely is a terrible thing for anyone to get over. When someone summarily declares you deficient in some way and drops what seems like a curse upon you, so that nothing will ever be normal again for you. Why did he do that?

I spent 7 years trying to make things better. It’s not like I never tried. It was just not meant to be. He was always fucking with my head – beating my optimism down, until in our last year together, I was a shadow of my former self, my confidence smashed into a pulp. It is of course convenient to blame someone else for your problems, but he killed my soul and he is still killing it. I hear his begrudging voice in my head every now and then, and all I can remember of him is how unpleasant everything about him is. Sometimes, I try to recall a pleasant memory, the nice things he did for me, and it’s always a blur for me. I can only remember how unpleasant it was. It was always work, a lot of work to get through the next day.

At 12.20 a.m., the doorbell screeched – and my first reaction was “Goddamn, who the fuck is it?” My immediate thought was, “Hmm, do you think it’s him?” Has he come looking for me? It has been one year since I packed my bags abruptly and took off for San Francisco. And it has been a tumultuous year for me to say the least.

Up until a month ago, I completely despised L. I was intensely angry at his self-righteous attitude and annoying obstinacy. Apart from the random rants of sarcasm, and self-defense, I never heard from him otherwise. Certainly, there were no apologies for his part in the break-up and fermentation of our 7-year relationship. In fact, every time or every instance I heard from him, he was his usual self-righteous self. Let me explain. He always has this put-on air of an objective expert about him and can never resist dispensing a piece of advice — even when nobody is asking for it. It is as if he has suffered so much and lived through so much that it makes him an expert on life — and his advice is truth. Yeah, it’s extremely annoying.