The kind of love you could do without

The two of you meet and it’s all flirtation and laughter and beauty. You feel as if you’re the luckiest person alive for having them in your life and you can’t wait for what lies ahead for the two of you — only to discover, a year later, that what you once had is no longer there.

You wake up one day and your face is swollen, your belly is bruised and your bones ache.

The magic and the love were all pretended, just to get you to where they wanted you. Once you were in for it, all of that was there was replaced by mistreatment and abuse. At first you might have thought it was your fault, they would say they were sorry and that they would never hurt you on purpose, they blame it on the stress of the day or on the colleague at work who pissed them off, but they soon make it a habit and they finally run out of excuses.

Every single day becomes a struggle for you. You are afraid to talk to them in case you use the wrong words and they start beating you again. You try to avoid them as much as possible so as to keep yourself for as much as possible.

The marks on your body are clearly visible; fingerprints on your neck, a swollen face, bruised legs or stomach and a shattered self-esteem. You are afraid of any hand gesture that occurs close to you and you find yourself jumping, out of fear, keeping a distance from everyone.

You end up losing faith in people and you stop believing in love; and that is certainly a love you could do without. You see, it’s not just your body that’s been bruised and abused; it’s you whole existence, your emotions and your trust.

It’s that you will never be the same again, unless you decide to step up and fight for yourself. It’s that all of your next relationships will suffer because of it. It’s that you will be suspicious and afraid all the time and you won’t let people close, so as not to hurt you again.

Every time someone will try to get close to you, you will send them away. You will lose people who would give everything for you out of fear and then you will be fighting to get them back, to explain and prove what was going on in your mind.

You justified every single, ugly gesture of a sick love in the hopes that things would get better or that your partner would finally come to their senses, but things only got worse until they got completely out of hand and you realized that your life was in real danger.

By the time you decide to walk away you will be scarred for life. You will be living in the shadow of that past relationship, assuming that the next to come will treat you the same.

So you shut your heart down, you leave everyone out until someone comes around; someone who will find other ways of entering your heart, but no matter how bad you want it you will be subconsciously holding back. By the time you decide to let yourself go and believe that their feelings were for real, the damage you will have caused will be irreparable.

You will be staring at a door while they are walking away and you will be wondering once again why you can’t just for once be happy and alive.

The ghosts of the past are hard to fight. The pain of the past is hard to go away. You might have some visible marks on your body to remind you, but you also have those invisible ones, the ones that shatter your heart and make you wonder why.

The choice was yours all along. You could have left before you got so severely damaged, but love and hope are always stronger.

So, you find yourself sitting there once again, tears in your eyes, sobbing, wondering what went wrong and you lost a partner who was everything you ever wanted and more; and you know; ghosts of the past, fears and insecurities. You went wrong and you attacked yourself and now you have to make it up to you. You have to make it up to that other person who just wanted to love you. You have to make it up to your love.