JustLikeADream
Favoured Frenzy
There is a man I hate, perhaps more fiercely than I have ever hated anyone, and the roots of that hatred are buried in the version of me he encountered when I was most vulnerable. He broke something in me then, something I did not know could be broken. He was the most toxic person I have ever known, or I would say simply the most complicated one to have left his fingerprints on my life.
What happened between us was never entirely his doing. I kept forcing him to stay, kept pulling him back into a place he never knew how to inhabit without hurting me, and I would always regret it afterward. There was something profoundly unhealthy about the way he existed with me, as though attachment itself had become a room with no windows.
And the strangest thing is that he was not always cruel. He had once been this impossibly passionate, soft, romantic boy who had carried a fascination with me for years. He still does. And somehow, that is what irritates me most. Because how does one reconcile tenderness with terror?
How does the same person who once looked at you with such softness become the person who calls you names, slut-shames you, confines your voice, and makes you feel as though even the walls around you are listening? We fought endlessly. His anger arrived faster than reason, his voice became a weapon, and the words he threw at me left stains that time could not entirely wash away. Perhaps that is why raised voices still awaken something uneasy inside me.
For years, I wondered about him. About the strange endurance of his desire. How could lust last this long? How could obsession survive years of distance, resentment, silence, and my almost deliberate coldness? How could someone continue waiting for a person who had stopped wanting them? Yet, somehow, he does.
Five or six years have passed, and there is still something uncannily familiar about the way he cares. He still checks on me. Still wishes me first on my birthday. Still supports me from whatever distance exists between us. He tells me about his life without being asked, as though I am still somehow a place where his happiness and sorrow instinctively arrive. Every little triumph. Every disappointment. Every insignificant detail that most people would never think to share. And I often give him almost nothing in return. Sometimes my coldness breaks him. I know it does. Maybe he wonders why the warmth he remembers no longer exists in me. Yet he returns anyway. Again. And again. And again.
Recently, he came to me carrying news that had made him extraordinarily happy. And while listening to him, something inside me became strangely still. How can a person hurt you so deeply and still continue to care for you? How can someone remain attached to the very person they once wounded? How can love, lust, guilt, obsession, nostalgia, tenderness, and destruction grow from the same soil and somehow refuse to kill one another?
Maybe what he feels is love. Maybe it is lust. Maybe it is obsession disguised as devotion, attachment dressed in the language of care, or simply the stubborn residue of a connection that once occupied too much of him to disappear cleanly. I don't know. And maybe I never will. What I do know is that his tenderness does not absolve his cruelty inside me. The fact that he still cares does not make what happened to me less real. His affection cannot retroactively soften the words he used, the fear he created, or the cage I remember living inside. But the opposite is true too.nHis cruelty does not necessarily mean that every tender feeling he ever had was counterfeit. That is the part I find hardest to understand about people.
We are not built with clean compartments. We can carry contradictions like organs. We can love and wound with the same hands. We can miss what we destroyed. We can protect someone in one moment and become the reason they need protection in another. We can spend years mourning the loss of someone whose disappearance from our lives was, in fact, the only way they could begin to breathe again. Maybe that is why I cannot reduce him to a monster, even when a part of me desperately wants to. Because monsters are easier. They allow us to believe that cruelty belongs only to cruel people, that tenderness belongs only to good ones, that the world is divided neatly between the hands that hurt and the hands that hold.
But human beings are much more terrifying than that. Sometimes the same hands can do both. Sometimes the person who remembers how you take your tea is also the person who taught you to fear raised voices. Sometimes the person who keeps returning with flowers is the same person from whom you once had to escape. Sometimes love survives where it should have died.
And perhaps that is the most haunting thing of all: that a person can remain tender toward the very soul they once wounded, while that soul can remember the tenderness and still choose never to return to it.
Maybe this is what it means to be human: to carry affection for people we can no longer safely love, to remember warmth inside the memory of a fire, and to spend years wondering whether the person who burned us ever understood that we were burning too.
//J
What happened between us was never entirely his doing. I kept forcing him to stay, kept pulling him back into a place he never knew how to inhabit without hurting me, and I would always regret it afterward. There was something profoundly unhealthy about the way he existed with me, as though attachment itself had become a room with no windows.
And the strangest thing is that he was not always cruel. He had once been this impossibly passionate, soft, romantic boy who had carried a fascination with me for years. He still does. And somehow, that is what irritates me most. Because how does one reconcile tenderness with terror?
How does the same person who once looked at you with such softness become the person who calls you names, slut-shames you, confines your voice, and makes you feel as though even the walls around you are listening? We fought endlessly. His anger arrived faster than reason, his voice became a weapon, and the words he threw at me left stains that time could not entirely wash away. Perhaps that is why raised voices still awaken something uneasy inside me.
For years, I wondered about him. About the strange endurance of his desire. How could lust last this long? How could obsession survive years of distance, resentment, silence, and my almost deliberate coldness? How could someone continue waiting for a person who had stopped wanting them? Yet, somehow, he does.
Five or six years have passed, and there is still something uncannily familiar about the way he cares. He still checks on me. Still wishes me first on my birthday. Still supports me from whatever distance exists between us. He tells me about his life without being asked, as though I am still somehow a place where his happiness and sorrow instinctively arrive. Every little triumph. Every disappointment. Every insignificant detail that most people would never think to share. And I often give him almost nothing in return. Sometimes my coldness breaks him. I know it does. Maybe he wonders why the warmth he remembers no longer exists in me. Yet he returns anyway. Again. And again. And again.
Recently, he came to me carrying news that had made him extraordinarily happy. And while listening to him, something inside me became strangely still. How can a person hurt you so deeply and still continue to care for you? How can someone remain attached to the very person they once wounded? How can love, lust, guilt, obsession, nostalgia, tenderness, and destruction grow from the same soil and somehow refuse to kill one another?
Maybe what he feels is love. Maybe it is lust. Maybe it is obsession disguised as devotion, attachment dressed in the language of care, or simply the stubborn residue of a connection that once occupied too much of him to disappear cleanly. I don't know. And maybe I never will. What I do know is that his tenderness does not absolve his cruelty inside me. The fact that he still cares does not make what happened to me less real. His affection cannot retroactively soften the words he used, the fear he created, or the cage I remember living inside. But the opposite is true too.nHis cruelty does not necessarily mean that every tender feeling he ever had was counterfeit. That is the part I find hardest to understand about people.
We are not built with clean compartments. We can carry contradictions like organs. We can love and wound with the same hands. We can miss what we destroyed. We can protect someone in one moment and become the reason they need protection in another. We can spend years mourning the loss of someone whose disappearance from our lives was, in fact, the only way they could begin to breathe again. Maybe that is why I cannot reduce him to a monster, even when a part of me desperately wants to. Because monsters are easier. They allow us to believe that cruelty belongs only to cruel people, that tenderness belongs only to good ones, that the world is divided neatly between the hands that hurt and the hands that hold.
But human beings are much more terrifying than that. Sometimes the same hands can do both. Sometimes the person who remembers how you take your tea is also the person who taught you to fear raised voices. Sometimes the person who keeps returning with flowers is the same person from whom you once had to escape. Sometimes love survives where it should have died.
And perhaps that is the most haunting thing of all: that a person can remain tender toward the very soul they once wounded, while that soul can remember the tenderness and still choose never to return to it.
Maybe this is what it means to be human: to carry affection for people we can no longer safely love, to remember warmth inside the memory of a fire, and to spend years wondering whether the person who burned us ever understood that we were burning too.
//J
pakuthi vaayich nirthunnu..enn swantham allatha marcellooo
kuthunnooo, what you meannnn