.:It Appears I'm Out Of Safe Spaces:.
There was a time I believed in sanctuary.
Not the kind with stained glass and hushed voices, but the kind you build out of words and stubbornness. This blog was that, once. A room of one's own, to borrow from someone far more eloquent than I'll ever be. I wrote like no one was watching, because I genuinely believed no one was. I was Gatsby before the parties, before the green light, before the wanting. Just a man and his words and the dark.
Then I realized anonymity was a story I'd been telling myself. The internet keeps receipts. And I kept writing anyway, because what else do you do when the alternative is silence?
People became complicated. I became complicated around people. At my worst, I was a black hole dressed in a punchline, pulling warmth toward me and converting it into nothing. So I learned to be careful. I learned to ration myself.
And then you happened.
For nearly a decade, you were the room I didn't have to be careful in. My Ithaca. The place I was always trying to get back to, no matter how long the journey took or how many monsters showed up along the way. I know how that sounds. I know the word "refuge" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a sentence about a person. But it's the only honest word I have.
I got comfortable. Odysseus who forgot he was still at sea. I confused arrival with destination, confused endgame with forever, confused the warmth of the fire for proof that the storm had passed. It hadn't. I just stopped looking at the sky.
When everything finally broke, I did what I thought was self-preservation. I didn't know it was also demolition. The one time I chose my own sanity, I handed you the rubble of everything we built and walked away from the wreckage like I had somewhere better to be. I didn't. I never did.
I thought I could be Orpheus. I thought if I just kept moving forward, kept my eyes ahead, kept building myself back into someone worth turning around for, I could earn my way back to what I'd lost. What I forgot about Orpheus is that he still lost her. The looking back wasn't the tragedy. The tragedy was always that some doors, once they close, close completely.
You said you needed to heal. I respected that. I stepped back. I gave you the distance you asked for, because that's what you do when you love someone more than you love your own impatience. What I didn't account for was that healing, for you, had a different geography entirely. A different map. A different destination.
I have no right to be angry. I know this. I have rehearsed this knowledge like scripture, worn it smooth with repetition. I have no right to be angry. And yet. Here I am. Angry. Grieving. Achilles sulking in his tent, except there's no war left to return to and nobody is coming to ask.
What I'm left with is this: you made me better than I was. That's not nothing. That's not even close to nothing. But you also decided, in the end, that better wasn't enough. That I wasn't worth rebuilding the room with.
And I have to live inside that self-made prison now.
Eastwood still looks like you. The streets remember. The places we passed through together have not gotten the memo that we are no longer we. I am haunted by a geography that refuses to update itself.
So I erase myself again. The way I have always erased myself, quietly, at the edges, making room. It's the one thing I've always been good at: disappearing in increments so gradual that nobody notices until I'm already gone.
Maybe I don't deserve a safe space. Maybe this is the tax on complacency, on assumption, on loving something so completely that you forget to fight for it until fighting is no longer an option. I pushed myself to my limits. I still came up short.
I wish I had the grace for a clean exit line. Something that would let you off the hook. Something generous and final and dignified.
But I'd be lying. And you've had enough of my omissions.
It's not fine. But you don't have to pretend to care anymore.
