I know it is selfish. I know it is. when you are hurting, when I am the one who caused it, something in me collapses inward and suddenly I am the one crying. not for you, for me. for the version of me that did this again. and the distance grows not because I stopped caring but because I got swallowed by my own guilt before I could reach you. I was not there for you. and then I blamed myself for not being there, which is its own kind of abandonment, leaving you twice, once by what I did and once by disappearing into my own shame.

When I try to show up and I feel myself unable to, when I sense you need more time with yourself, it does something to me I struggle to describe. it is not only that you are hurting. it is the specific terror of knowing I may have been the cause. because that sends me somewhere I do not want to go. and I want to say this clearly, because it is the thing I am most afraid of.

It happened today. for the first time I felt it, that specific gravity, the pull back toward the version of me I have been slowly climbing away from. guilt and self hatred and the relentless weight of being hard on myself, these are not just feelings, they are a place. a dark and specific place I have lived in before and fought my way out of. and I cannot just feel your pain and hold you and be present while also being dragged back there. I do not have the footing for both at once.

You hold something without knowing it. the permission, the direction. you can send me there without meaning to and I trust that you never would on purpose, you have never truly harmed me, I know that. but I needed you to know the map, to see where the edge is, so we can both watch for it together. I do not want to be afraid of you. I do not want to flinch near the person I love most. that thought alone frightens me more than anything else in this.

So I need to work on myself first. not as an excuse or a wall but as something real, I cannot keep living where one wrong step might send me back into the worst chapters of my life. I want to heal that part before it becomes the thing that stands between us. I want to come to you without that fear living underneath everything. I want to love you without the ground being so fragile beneath my feet.