Nobody puts baillee in the corner

There will always be one person in your life you can’t shake. They’re the person who simultaneously puts a smile on your face while plunging a knife in your chest. Even though they destroy you time and time again, you’ll always go running to them the second they call out for you, the handle of the blade they struck you with still flittering with your heartbeat. 

In my grand Christmas tradition of mimicking Love Actually, you have to be honest during the holidays, (Mr. Rick “Self-Preservation” Grimes taught us you storm out of your own apartment and leave a bewildered Keira Knightley in the dust if you aren’t), so here goes. 

I don’t understand what you did, and I probably never will. I don’t know if I trust anything you said to me. You knew how to make me feel like the most important and special person in the world. Now, I feel broken and shattered. The sad part is, I think I loved you. Scratch that. I know I did. Parts of me still do. 

I’ve tried to drown every idea of you in every bottle I can find, but the tiniest thing makes all of the pain come flooding back, instantlybshocking me back to sobriety. 

One of the last things you said to me was to promise you we’d always be friends. The funny thing is, I’m still here, but my outstretched hand isn’t clutching anything but empty air. It’s like I’m grieving something that never fully planted; I’m mourning something stagnant and rootless. 

A lot of people have come freely into, and just as freely out of, my life, and I’ve only viewed them as fleeing lessons in love. I’m still waiting to find out what you taught me though. For a single moment, you were a permeated fixture in my life, like the weird light switch in my living room I can never quite figure out because it never seems to have a real attachment to anything. 

It’s almost been a year since you last spoke to me. You’ve missed me making peace with my dying father. You’ve missed my birthday. You’ve missed Halloween and Thanksgiving and probably Christmas. You’ve missed celebrating a new job with me. You missed my first night at standup. At the risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, all of these things can’t help but make me wonder: have you missed me? 

Do you ever get distracted at work thinking about me? Do you ever think about the very first time we hung out? (and how Kate Mara was not meant to play a gunslinging AI?) Do you ever think about where we would be if I had answered the phone that night? 

But I didn’t. I missed your calls. I missed your texts. You didn’t want to talk about it the next morning or the one after. Pretty soon, you didn’t want to talk about anything at all. 

I told you a week before my birthday I would never text you again, and I won’t. I’ll respect your apparent wishes, even if I fail to understand them, because this isn’t for you: this is for me. 

This is my attempt at trying to get some minuscule sliver of closure. This is my terrible venture of moving on. This is my feeble stab at goodbye. 

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get over you. I know it’ll take someone, but I genuinely don’t know if that someone is a partner, or if that someone is just a newly, reassembled me. All I know is I have to start trying. I can’t dwell on you like a bad habit any longer. You quickly became yet another vice, but it was easier to quit smoking than it has been to quit you. 

You and nicotine have equally bad effects on my health, so I have to extinguish my torch for you in the newly-vacant ashtray. Something has to take up that space, right?

No longer yours, 

Baillee Grace