Who is this crazy, unhinged, drunk girl and where the fuck did she come from? Oh, I know. You made her. You created her from scratch with the way you watch her. Your eyes trail her across the room and she feels more seen, desirable and alive than she has in years.
Sorry. Let me start over but this time in past tense because that’s what we are.
You created me from scratch with the way you watched me. Your eyes trailed me across the room and I felt more seen, desirable and alive than I had in years.
It was the lingering, lustful, longing looks. You levelled me with lingering, lustful, longing looks that brought me back from the dead until one day, out of nowhere, you stopped looking at me. What happened? Where did the lingering, lustful, longing looks go? We both know it took me a while to notice you and your yearning for me so when I finally noticed, and reciprocated, did I overdo my own yearning? Was my reciprocation too desperate for you? Did it turn you off? Did I, who once ruled our kingdom inside my room, turn you off?
Remember how it all began with one phone call in the middle of the night? I believed that phone call was the Ace of Spades to my happily ever after, but it was just a spade I used to stupidly and steadily dig my own grave. Oh but how magical it was when it all began. How magical we were. I had a marvellous time with the instant replies, the compliments, the flirting, the sexting, the insatiable curiosity about each other in and out of our kingdom inside my room.
Until you did not have the balls to dump me, so instead you ghosted me.
But it turned out I am harder to forget than I was to leave
Twenty. The number of days it took you to forget how fucking hot I am and how lucky you were to have my affection and attention. Out of sight, out of fucking mind.
Five. The number of days it took you to realize I am harder to forget than I was to leave. 5 days and 2 hours, but who’s counting.
Fifty-eight. The number of hours from when I reminded you how fucking hot I am to when you accepted I am harder to forget than I was to leave. You unghosted yourself and we rose from the dead. I swore to be the mythical Cool Girl from Gone Girl this time around. And I was, until you cooled off again and ghosted me twice in as many months. Now here I am with a broken ego and a broken heart, but I still can’t let go. Begging you to pick me, choose me, love me, or whatever the hell Meredith Grey said.
At night I would send you crazy, unhinged, drunk texts that I could not bear to read in the cold light of day. And during the day I would count the hours until I could get drunk again and read my crazy, unhinged, drunk texts from last night without wanting to die. I would count the hours until I could get drunk enough to send you another slew of dramatic, desperate texts. And when the hours felt too long… well, it’s happy hour somewhere, right? I would get drunk and text you. I would text you and get drunk. Rinse, repeat.
If only I knew that my desperate, embarrassing, pathetic drunk declarations of love would only confuse my brain. That sending those crazy, unhinged, drunk texts would only trick my brain into amplifying my feelings for you. And those amplified feelings would only convince me to send even more crazy, unhinged, drunk texts. Rinse, repeat. I was a functioning alcoholic ’til nobody noticed my new aesthetic. But for a functioning alcoholic, I repeatedly did not function all too well.
Falling for you felt like flying, but it was just falling. I was flying up until the moment I fell so fucking hard I smashed all 206 bones on impact. Now I want to smash every single mirror in the world because I cannot bear to look at the crazy, unhinged, drunk girl staring back at me. The same way I cannot bear to look at my nightly crazy, unhinged, drunk texts to you. Was it really me who said all that? How and when and why did I become so desperate for your withdrawn affection and attention? I know I am Down Bad, but girl get up! Get the fuck up!! Pick me, choose me, love me??? Bitch please! This ain’t no Grey’s Anatomy shit. Get the fuck up girl!
I love you and it’s ruining my life. I have been gripping the broken pieces of us so tightly, the shards have shred my palms. But I ignored the broken pieces and my bleeding palms because what came after we broke, I knew, was going to be so much worse. And there was a part of me that needed my bleeding palms to feel alive. It was self-harm, but I needed to see my palms bleed to know I was alive because you brought me back from the dead only to kill me twice in as many months.
You were my favourite person but now you are my favourite ghost. My feelings for you are too big they are dying to burst through me, even if it means killing me on their way to you. You who does not want either me or my big feelings that are now too big for me to handle by myself. The sadness has faded into madness and now I must quit you the way I quit cigarettes; unsuccessfully, then all at once. Or die trying.
I take in a deep breath and slowly release it as I lift my eyes off my Letter to Burn. The pin-drop silence in the room focuses my attention on six pairs of eyes looking back at me, and in them I see the anger and pain and sadness I vomited into the letter I just read.
“Thank you for sharing that,” the group therapist says from beside me, breaking the spell of silence my letter cast over the room.
“That was very brave. Well done,” she says with the kindest, most understanding smile that immediately conjures tears in my eyes. I try to say something, anything, but reading my Letter to Burn in front of everyone has taken everything I have. All I can do is nod as I make my way back to my seat.
It is my fifth week at the Down Bad Rehabilitation Centre, a first-of-its-kind facility that treats women who have been left dickmatised and/or heartbroken by a situationship. This is my second group therapy and for today’s session each of us had to write a letter to the person who is the reason we are at Down Bad and read it out loud to the group. We hold on to these letters until we burn them in a highly formal and symbolic ceremony the night before we are discharged from Down Bad.
As the therapist tells us about the agenda for our next session, I sweep a glance over the other girls in the group. All 13 of us are different in the countless ways human beings differ from each other. The only thing we have in common with each other, and with all the other girls at Down Bad, is we are addicted to someone who ruined our lives. What started off as an infatuation rapidly devolved into a dependence that took over every aspect of ourselves and our lives. After all, addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story.
Our “love stories” are as different as we are, but also wildly similar. They all began with one look or one touch or one kiss, one shared joke or one drunken night out that had us begging for more. And like any good dealer, our person was more than willing to supply us with heady, hallucinogenic doses of the good stuff. We lapped it up with the hungry obsession of any addict until they cut us off when we lost our novelty and they got bored. The lucky ones were given a variation of the “it’s not you, it’s me” bullshit. The unlucky ones, like me, were ghosted.
And just like that we were down bad, shaking and crying in a corner for the good stuff they used to give us for free. We were so down bad we could have sold our souls for just one more hit. Instead we just lost our shit and ended up here.
Some of us came to Down Bad willingly, and some, like me, are here after an intervention. As we leave the therapy room and head to the dining room for lunch, my Letter to Burn is at the forefront of my mind and I cannot help but think back to the who, what, when, where, why and how I got to be a patient at Down Bad.
Lwile the Leo 