AA shit, here we go again

It’s almost a year now — and I find myself on the same battlefield, only the battleground has changed its shape. I circle the ruins of a question: what happened, why it happened, how it came to be. There is no clear enemy to point a trembling finger at, no one to proclaim the aggrieved. The roles dissolve into fog. I am both accuser and accused, the playwright and the unwilling actor in a scene I keep replaying.

I catch myself seeking refuge in stories — dressing my wounds in costumes of victimhood or villainy, as if fate were a script I could read aloud to justify the bruises. “A manchild,” she said once, and the words lodged in me like a splinter. I still do not know all the meaning of it, but somewhere in the echo of her voice I recognize a truth I have refused: that some suffering is self-inflicted, some kinds of pain chosen or cultivated. I promised much to her; perhaps she never believed those promises, but I am the one who carries their weight. Maybe karma has already begun its tally — perhaps the dulling of taste is mercy and punishment braided together, a bodily amputation of greed.

There is a small, ridiculous, monstrous part of me that wants to reach out — to message, to call — and another part that is too proud to lower itself. So I hover, shameless and shivering, over her social pages, trading dignity for the illusion of proximity. The shame of it is heavier than any fear; I am more terrified of failing to satisfy her — of being inadequate in the private economy of a woman’s needs — than I am of confession. A woman’s needs feel like another universe I thought I could explore, but I drowned in its currents and washed up knowing only that I am doomed to a different shore.

I fight the compulsion to stalk, to expect a breadcrumb of attention, to glean from silence whether she thinks of me. I want, more than anything, to be better: to tend the small brave work of self-improvement and let memory loosen its grip. And yet I know she, too, shaped the story — her deeds met mine and they produced consequence. It was never a single author. If I am a villain in her narrative, that villain grew there, tended by both of us. Now the true battle is quieter: not proving who was wrong, but learning how not to return to the same ground.