i’m not a background character in his ego trip
how can i stop handing men the knife and calling it intimacy?
authors note: inspired by one too many shitty experiences. growth from pain. my life became a relapse. a carousel of ghosts in different hoodies. a pattern dressed up as romance. one man after another new name, same ache. same hunger. same begging to be devoured, then held. same craving to be looked at like a secret instead of a person. i wasn’t in love. i was addicted. to the high of being wanted of being chosen for a second before they disappeared. even by accident. even by someone with dirt behind his eyes and no idea how to say my name like it meant something. male validation was my favorite poison. a shot glass of silence that still made me blush. i knew it burned… but i liked how warm it made me feel. he didn’t love me. he loved the reflection. he didn’t love me. he loved the image. the hair. the pout. the way i laughed like i needed saving. he loved the girl who fit in his hand but never the one with a voice. the curated chaos. the aesthetic of soft tragedy. the sadness he could fuck without fixing. he loved the girl who dressed like his fantasy but never the one who cried in the bathroom after he left. (i wanted to show him the mess but i knew he’d leave faster if he saw it.) i was a mirror angled perfectly toward his ego. a voice that never got too loud. a body that posed like a prayer and broke like a secret i was a screen. a body. a pair of lips that begged too quietly. a mirror that always smiled back. i dressed for the role. tighter. shorter. prettier. i wore shame like perfume. i turned my softness into strategy. my sadness into seduction. and called it love. tight skirts like lifelines. made myself a museum he could walk through and forget. and i thought if i dressed the wound pretty enough he’d mistake it for art. i was something to be looked at, not held. talked over, not known. i wanted to be wanted so badly i let them take pieces of me just to stay warm in their hands for a moment. i offered skin when what i needed was safety. called it chemistry when it was really just hunger wearing a low neckline. (i wanted it all. i wanted the ache and the ruin. i wanted to show him my blood and the scars. i wanted him to show me his.) (before i could spell the word love, i started confusing pain with closeness. started believing if someone could hurt me, they must be near enough to matter.) (i don’t just want to be touched. i want to be ruined slowly, sweetly, completely. i want to hand someone the rope and dare them to pull it tight.)
i thought if i gave them my body, they’d give me something back. a feeling. a future. a name in their phone they wouldn’t forget. but they only ever remembered how i tasted. not how i wept. i was never loved. i was craved. and there’s a difference. i was just another girl for guys with sex drives and sad boy playlists. another soft body to press their want against until they got full and left me starving. i kept thinking if i played the part well enough… the silent girl, the cool girl, the “you’re not like other girls” girl. he’d finally stay. but i was never real to them. just a feeling. just a fantasy they could mute once they finished. but god. the crash. how it wrapped around me like a blackout curtain. like fog with teeth. like a storm i invited in and tried to romance as it wrecked the room. how it made me feel hollow in a way no mirror could fix. every time he left, i collapsed like a puppet with her strings cut. a body with no script. a girl chewing on silence like it might turn into closure. empty hands. a mouth full of questions. a girl sitting in a room full of silence she once mistook for love. and it made me crazy. insane. deranged in a lipstick-on-your-teeth kind of way. the kind of ache that makes you stalk his story at 3am and call it intuition. the kind of dizzy ache that makes you check the same messages forty-two times looking for a sign you missed. (i sound crazy. maybe i am. but only because i wasn’t allowed to be honest.) i’d cry so hard my ribs would bruise. i’d stop eating. then binge like it was penance. then starved again to shrink myself small enough to fit back into his peripheral vision. to earn back a body i was told might make him stay. grief lived in my throat. in the wrappers. in the restraint. in the way my ribs became rosaries and my stomach was always in prayer. and when it got too loud i left my body. blacked out in bathrooms. snorted attention off glass tables. lit joints like prayer candles asking to forget him for five minutes. asked molly to hold me when no one else would. smoked my sadness until it tasted like control. asked anything to just let me be someone else for a while. someone who doesn’t ache like this. (i was crushed up like powder on a phone screen. but i had to stay pretty about it. i had to prove im easy to love.) because heartbreak made everything too bright too sharp too fucking real. and escapism felt like peace. and oblivion was softer. and still. he lived in my head like a god i didn’t choose and yet couldn’t stop praying to. his name echoed in my bones. his apathy, a religion. i worshipped. i waited. i warped. it wasn’t love. it was obsession. pure and ugly. he became the background noise of every fucking thought. my whole nervous system a hostage to his next message. every ping, every post, every shift in tone— a prophecy. a punishment.
i pretended he was more interesting than me. cooler. deeper. harder to understand. just so it made sense that i was chasing. just so it made sense why he didn’t see me the way i saw him. i undersold myself like it was a strategy. convinced myself i was lucky just to be in the same room as someone who couldn’t even spell my name right the first time. (i didn’t want to scare him off with how much i felt. so i stayed soft when i wanted to scream.) i wanted to disappear just to be missed. i wanted to die just to make them weep. just to make them look. just to make them sorry. some days i didn’t want to be alive not because i didn’t want to live, but because it felt like i already didn’t. and the worst part? i’ve always been cooler than every man i’ve obsessed over. always louder. brighter. harder to kill. they were bored boys with cigarettes and i handed them wildfires. i built temples for men who didn’t even know how to pray. wrote love letters in blood to boys who didn’t know how to read. my friends hated it. they watched me shapeshift. watched me rehearse texts like spellwork. watched me cry over men they’d walk past on the street. and no one ever says it, but i know i’m the one who got away. the one they remember when the room goes quiet. when their new girl doesn’t laugh like i did. even if they never say it, even if they never come back. what haunts me most is how much power they had. how a man with no poetry could still ruin my week with a one-word reply. how i turned broken boys into gods and handed them the knife. why am i like this? why do i call it love when it’s just me bleeding for someone who never even asked me to? why do i keep trying to heal them? as if loving a wound long enough will turn it into a home. i rebranded. reconstructed. repackaged the same pain in prettier packaging. posted my suffering repackaged the same body with a new caption. new filters. new ways to say “please stay” without using words. i chased tension like prophecy. read breadcrumbs like scripture. called silence poetic and cruelty “complicated.” i starved for affection and called it love. i suffered, so it had to mean something, right? i let myself be consumed. digested. discarded. then blamed myself for not tasting sweet enough. but i’m done. i’m quitting. cold. no more hits of almost. no more praise from men who wouldn’t even bleed for me. i’m not a reward. i’m not a body built for moodboards. i’m not a background character in their ego trip. i’m not your soft girl fantasy who disappears when the lights come on. i want love that doesn’t require my disappearance. and if that never comes at least i’ll know i stopped breaking myself just to be seen.
