A Bad Swirl / Bad Joke

August 25, 2025

After 10 months playing chess with my feelings, a swirl of emotions I kept rearranging, the truth is coming to the surface. I thought that if I aligned my chakras, finished the puzzle of our demise, and found just the right words... I’d level up and erase the bad joke that it was to love you.

Sadly, after ashes settled and new friends became acquaintances I don't plan to keep, I realized:

 You said things you never meant. You loved me but didn’t actually want to do something about it. You liked my shine only when it lit you up. That you need everyone else’s approval to convince yourself I was enough. Do you know what that does to a person? It makes them claw at their own skin, searching for a light that's gone, wondering if they ever had it to begin with.

So I left, moved cities, started over, filled my days with work, noise and new friends, anything to make me forget but the seat across the table at the café, is still empty on Sundays and my laughter only lasts half as long as it did when you were the one calling it out of me. My life is full but I am empty and that emptiness is shaped exactly like you.

I thought leaving would cauterize the wound but healing smells like burning flesh. I thought reasons and excuses would set me free, but all they did was wrap the cage in prettier words.

Nowadays, my silence has grown teeth. I saw it first, when you shook your head at my eyes, looking for more of the spark you'd already taken: I became a punchline, of a really bad, bad joke. You said I love you, it felt like a punch. I walked through glass, moved as a corpse.

At some point I tried tearing the pain out by the root. Even if I had to pluck strand by strand the heartache but it was like guessing which cord to cut on a ticking bomb. Chaos everywhere. I desperately, wanted, to rip my heart out of its ribcage, pretend that work is satisfying, my new friends are thrilling, and that alone would make life worth living...

I got away

With everything.

But no one told me the emptiness would swallow my life whole. It wasn’t just the coffee table, it was my jokes, my laughter, my will… Nobody warned me what would happen next. They just said I deserved the best. No one told me I’d birthed another version of me, unwittingly, settling into a life I never dreamt of. I never dodged you, I carry you, lodged in my body somewhere.

it has been almost a year, and the bad feeling keeps kicking my gut, rotting at the center of me. 

Yet no one sees it. No one warns you that grief this ugly wears makeup well. That you can sit across from someone, order another coffee, smile, and inside your chest there is still a fucking battlefield.

Now that the bad joke is told, i don't see anyone laughing...

Except, maybe you.