a final farewell

I am dipping my ink in forgiveness, trying to write your name with soft edges. I want to thank the person you were before that awful October. I want to thank her for the pieces of me she collected and for the steadiness of her hand when she stitched me back together.

Thank you, for singing me songs on your guitar, for every time I wrote you a poem in my tearstained notebook.

Thank you, for throwing me a rope, each time I lost my balance on a cliff face, each time you saw me falling, each time you found me broken at the bottom.

Thank you, for bringing hot air balloons into my world, for lifting me into the air, over cloud cover and rain. Thank you for showing me the stars and touching the moon with me.

It's so easy to bury these memories. To cover them in fresher ones that burn like cinders. So easy to relive the way you changed, the way you became someone who would rather push me over that cliff face and scatter all of my loose pieces.

But I will forever force myself to acknowledge how it started. A book is not complete without its prologue, without those first eight chapters that paint you in a golden brush script font.

So thank you, for a hopeful prologue and the belief that those eight chapters would be a lifelong series.

You promised me a happy ending, only to begin tearing the pages and blacking out the paragraphs. But you were only human.

I almost hated you for running. For your abandonment and ignorance and apathetic disappearance. But some kind of deep-founded, long ago faded gratitude stopped me.

You killed me. But first, you resurrected me.

I did not know whether to massacre our memories or dissect them. Did not know whether to despise you or myself.

But that is over now.

I would like to thank you, for the day you tossed your cruel goodbye at my feet. For the way you drove away from my house without ever looking back. For the empty silences you choked me in. For the hell you let me burn in. For the way you never dropped a rope into rock bottom.

I want to thank you because this armour is forged from my obituary. Because the callouses on my skin are credited to you and the heights I climbed are all thanks to your absence.

I want to thank you because I am more alive than I have ever been. Never before have my veins been filled with this much seawater. Never before have I exhaled so much contentment. Never before have my bones been so unbreakable.

I did not want to acknowledge the pallor of my skin. Did not want to bring notice to the scream sitting in my throat. Did not want to admit that you were slowly entombing me. Slowly sinking the knife deeper each day. But you were.

This is a letter of appreciation, to the old you and the new you alike. The girl who saved me and the girl who ruined me. The girl who gifted me friendship and the one who snatched it back equally as quickly.

I will stuff the paper into a bottle, place it in the ocean, and hope it never reaches you.

You, my muse, my destruction, my hardening skin, are the reason I am what I am.

I want to hand you gratitude. But more than that, I want to give you forgiveness. So I will combine both, and form a final farewell.