How Does It Feel to Call the Shots?

On nights like these, you were the one I reached for.

When fear moved through me and my legs began to shake, it was your presence that reminded my body how to stay. There was a time when your arms felt like shelter, when separation still seemed impossible because love had made us believe we could survive anything.

Then the tower fell.

And somehow, in the collapse, everything good about me became harder to remember.

The years I spent fighting for my mental health, learning how to live, learning how to love, learning how to become someone capable of building a family... those victories seemed to disappear beneath the weight of my failures.

One fall became the whole story.

One season became my identity.

And love, which I had once believed could hold complexity, began to feel conditional.

I tried so hard to become the person I thought a family needed.

I tried to provide.

I tried to remain strong.

I tried to keep moving even when I was exhausted, frightened, and losing pieces of myself.

And eventually, I fell.

What hurt most was not the fall.

It was looking up afterward and realizing that the person I imagined would still be there had already gone.

Overnight, I became something easier to leave behind.

The tenderness disappeared from the interpretation of me. Compassion gave way to judgment. The person who had once known all my softness suddenly seemed to remember only the parts that had become difficult.

For a long time, I tried to bend myself into whatever shape might make me lovable again.

Thinner.

Calmer.

Stronger.

More successful.

Less needy.

Less afraid.

Less complicated.

But every attempt to become the version of myself I thought someone else could accept moved me farther away from the person I actually was.

And maybe that is the deepest loss of all.

Not losing you.

Losing myself while trying not to.

I would have done almost anything for you.

Now I am learning to do those things for myself.

I get to build the future.

I get to choose the road.

I get to sit in the driver’s seat and decide where my life goes next.

There is freedom in that.

But freedom does not erase grief.

I am grateful that I still get to succeed, still get to create, still get to become someone new.

I just wish you had been beside me when I did.

Because I loved my partner.

I chose my partner.

And in my heart, love meant staying long enough to see whether the person who fell could stand again.

I wish my insecurities had remained human instead of becoming burdens.

I wish my fear had still been worthy of tenderness.

I wish we had known how to hold each other without asking the other person to carry everything.

There is so much that could have been different.

On both sides.

We were young in ways we did not yet understand.

Two people trying to rush fate.

So consumed by the idea of loving each other that somewhere along the way we stopped knowing how to love ourselves.

And once that happened, we eventually lost our ability to love one another well.

There were conversations we could have had.

There were apologies we could have made sooner.

There were softer exits.

There were slower decisions.

There were chances to choose curiosity before judgment.

But history does not reorganize itself simply because we finally understand what we should have done.

Eventually, the card is laid.

The hand is finished.

And there comes a point when continuing to reach backward is no longer devotion.

It is refusal.

So I have to move.

There is no more trying to resurrect what no longer wants to live.

Whether I am running away or running toward something entirely new, I am leaving this town.

I am leaving the version of myself who waited here for you.

I am leaving the conversations I replayed alone.

I am leaving the fantasy that one perfect explanation could somehow return us to who we were before everything broke.

You made my days brighter once.

You made sunlight feel hotter.

And when you first broke my heart, even the ashes still carried warmth.

For a long time, I lived beside those ashes believing warmth meant something could still be rebuilt.

Now I understand that sometimes ashes are simply evidence that something burned.

Not every ruin is asking to become a home again.

So I will remember what was beautiful.

I will forgive what I can.

I will grieve what cannot be repaired.

And I will keep walking.

Maybe one day, when enough time has passed and we have both become people we could never have been together, you will look back and understand what happened differently.

Maybe I will too.

And perhaps there will be no villain left in the story.

Just two people who loved each other deeply, hurt each other profoundly, and eventually had to stop asking the past to become their future.

Still, there is one question I sometimes imagine leaving behind with the ashes:

"How does it feel to finally call the shots,look at everything we became,and admit...

I fucked up?"

Fairytale Gone Bad, Jo He and Chris Charming

"I no longer accept for men to come into my life and leave while making me an enemy. I reject any vibrational energy sent toward me by anyone. I do not need energy of another to satisfy me. I create and produce for the sake of change and liberation. I do not need to ask permission to share my truth. I do not need to worry about back lash from anyone because this is my truth of how they made me feel. My feelings get to matter to me. I am joy and i accept love in my life. I live for celebration not fear of separation and cop threats. All bound by fear within boys who painted me the image of their nightmare after i became thier nirvana, boo hoo hope this doesn’t feel to violating. It feel violating to be loved, hated, held, abused, seen, forgotten and yet something will always remain. Me. The constant thread that stings me and all of you together. Let’s examine how we all relate with one another."