14.02.21: Who I Am Without You

For a long time, I have defined myself by the things I've been through. But maybe it doesn't have to be this way; maybe you are not the things that hurt you.

I don’t know who I am without you.

These were the last words she said to me, every syllable soft and fragile; spun sugar breaking beneath the slightest movement of air.

I used to think that I held on to the pain of losing her - of losing anything - because I’m a writer. Because, without grief, I can’t create anything that’s truly meaningful. Of course, I know this isn’t true. I know this is nothing more than a story I tell myself - a past, rewritten to suit my narrative.

The truth is, I’ve been holding on the things that haunt me much longer than I’ve been writing about them.

I think trauma has become a defining characteristic of who I am; a light to run towards whenever the darkness holds my bones. At my worst, it has been an excuse, a label pinned to my collarbone that can be used to explain away my anger, my drinking, any selfish behaviour. For a long time, self-destruction was the only thing I was good at; broken was all I knew how to be.

Maybe, I don’t hold on to pain so I can write. Maybe, I hold on because I don’t know who I am without it.

She knew this about me long before I did.

My ability to fall apart was an ever-present in our relationship. She would watch me crumble, and then do all she could to put me back together, even if it meant using pieces of herself to do it. All too often, keeping my head above the water meant her holding her breath, and it took me a long time to realise that love shouldn’t feel like drowning.

Shortly after it ended, she sent me a letter, in which she called me ‘a broken boy, in love with the pieces’. Nobody has known me like that. But it’s only now I can see that she was right, that I defined myself solely by the things I have survived. But that definition was never of a survivor, instead it was a wreckage.

A little over a year ago, I burnt all the letters she sent me. I told myself this was an act of letting go, but I think it was more about denying the fact that I lost her. She wasn’t taken, she didn’t leave. I let her go, because I wasn’t brave enough to actually try and heal - to find out who I was without the monsters.

I swear, for days after burning them, I would keep finding their ash on my skin; the bodies of all the words she wrote, returning to ask me why.

It’s too late for me and her, but I don’t think it’s too late to change the narrative I have created for myself. I don’t believe it’s too late to heal.

Maybe the past is just a story we tell ourselves, and every passing moment is an opportunity to change the ending.

Maybe I can still find out who I am, without her, without the trauma, without all of it. Maybe we are more than the things that hurt us, and it is possible for the future to survive the past.

Yours.

Blake