I think I would erase the day I call The Deceiver. Not because I didn’t see it coming, but because sometimes knowing something is happening doesn’t make it hurt any less. I was the option that seemed better than the rest, the choice that finally made sense when disappointment had exhausted every other possibility. And somehow, I wasn’t even given a day to breathe before the decision had already been made. It was planned, thought through. Executed so quietly that by the time I understood what was happening, I was already standing inside the consequences of it. Maybe that’s what makes deception so painful, not simply that someone deceived you, but that they had time to know exactly what they were doing while you were still believing in what you thought you had.
Now I sometimes look at you and wonder how long you can keep the face on. I can almost see the struggle behind it, the effort required to keep pretending that this was the only choice you could have made. So perhaps you should make the most of it. If I was your ticket out of disappointment, then what happens when the ticket stops taking you where you thought it would? What happens when the person you chose begins to feel less like an escape and more like a burden? I laugh at the thought sometimes, not because it is funny, but because there is something almost tragic about watching someone convince themselves that a decision made from disappointment must eventually become happiness.
And then my own fears catch up with me, the fears I thought I had buried. The daydreams of being left behind. The suspicion that perhaps I was never really enough. Every little disappointment begins to feel heavier than it should. Not necessarily because someone says anything, but because actions have their own language. A change in tone, a little distance, a hesitation where there wasn’t one before. Suddenly I’m asking myself the question I never wanted to ask: Will I ever be good enough? And perhaps the cruelest part is that I think I knew from the beginning. I knew something wasn’t right. I knew there were things I wasn’t being told. Yet I played my part anyway. I became the understanding one, the patient one, the one who stayed. Maybe I thought that if I played the role perfectly enough, the ending would change.
But perhaps this is the part where I finally stop pretending. I don’t want to spend my life being someone’s better option, someone’s temporary certainty, someone’s answer to a disappointment they never healed from. I don’t want to be loved because I was useful at the right moment. And I don’t want to become the villain simply because I eventually became tired of being the person who carried everything quietly. Maybe one day you will tell the story differently. Maybe I will become the person who didn’t understand, who wasn’t enough, who somehow ruined everything.
Perhaps that is the price of leaving a story before someone else has finished writing your character. But I know what I gave. I know what I believed. And I know how hard I tried to remain kind while something inside me was asking why I had to keep proving that I deserved to stay. So don’t worry, darling, I know my place, I just hope that one day I remember that knowing my place doesn’t mean acceptig the place someone else decided to give me.
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