D,

For the entirety of my life I have protected you. I have relentlessly performed mental gymnastics to make it fit so that it wasn’t your fault. My self flagellation ends today. I do not love you. I have never liked you.I have never respected you. I did not deserve to feel guilty for having minimal contact with you in order to preserve my life and I will not feel any shame for disentangling from the enmeshed dysfunction of my childhood; youth isn’t supposed to have the same impact as war!

Societies vision of the matriarch and the unconditional love and support that is supposed to inherently reside within ‘mother’ has been a fucking myth to me. I only knew the bitter, hateful rejection of a sociopath who secretly wished she HAD miscarried so that her life could have been her own -I always knew that’s how you felt deep down; it’s in the eyes chico. I never once forgot that I was an anchor to the past you wanted to erase. My mere existence meant you would never be able to move on and you never once failed to make sure I understood how much you resented me for that. You believed your life had been stolen from you the moment mine was saved. This wasn’t what you asked for huh? Well I didn’t choose this either mum.

I’ve spent my entire life refining my expectations in order to minimise the impact of your abuse and neglect and I’ve only just accepted, for real this time, that you are incapable of empathy and will never be able to take accountability for the past. I can break the cycles though. I can ensure the generational trauma stops with me. The only way I can do that is to cut the cord. (Ironic isn’t it that I use pregnancy metaphors – both as someone motherless and as someone who was inappropriately parentified.)

I wouldn’t have had to almost fucking die at the hands of a ‘lover’ to learn that I’ve never known the difference between being in love and being in fear if you hadn’t had planted the seed that one could love something one didn’t like. You primed me for later abuse and gave me no blueprint for healthy connection at all when you proudly and repeatedly snarled that you ‘loved me, but didn’t like me very much.’ Fuck you for that. I hope you find enough peace and self awareness to realise how messed up it is that you internalised such a dissonant and toxic perception of connection.

There isn’t a version of the story where I get to be in relation with you and live assimilated, safe and free from complex pain and trauma and after choosing you my whole life it’s finally time I choose me. Five hundred words to articulate 12738 days of gaslighting and silence isn’t enough, but I guess I only need one for Goodbye.