I Know Who You Are

by Alice Feeney

think we broke us last night. Sometimes it’s the people who love us the most that hurt us the hardest; because they can.

The lies we tell ourselves are always the most dangerous.

Life remodels relationships like the sea reshapes the sand; eroding dunes of love,

He thought he was losing me, so he started to hold on too tight, so tight that it hurt.

I’ve never felt so trapped by my own wrong turns. I built my prison in the way that people often do, with solid walls made from bricks of guilt and obligation. Walls that seemed to have no doors, but the way out was always there. I just couldn’t see it.

It feels like a lie to describe this as my home; it has never felt like one. A bird never chooses its own cage.

Denial is the most destructive form of self-harm.

He became my moon, constantly circling, controlling my tides of self-doubt, occasionally blocking out the sun altogether, leaving me somewhere dark, where I was afraid and couldn’t see what was really going on. Or pretended not to.

The ties of a love like ours twist themselves into a complicated knot, one that is hard to unravel. People would ask why I stayed with him if they knew the truth, and I’d tell them the truth if they did: because I love us more than I hate him, and because he’s the only man I’ve ever pictured myself having

Sometimes we pretend not to understand things that we do.

it makes it almost impossible to lie to him, and I can’t always speak the truth; my inability to trust people won’t allow it.

I question what it is about him that I find so attractive. Sometimes I wonder if I only ever want things I think I can’t have.

I’ve fought too hard to protect my privacy to just casually give it away.

I’ve never felt that I’m good enough at anything; no matter how hard I try, I just don’t fit.

My brother said it could still be my favorite bowl even when it wasn’t perfect anymore. He said things that are a little bit broken can still be beautiful.

Sometimes I just don’t know what is wrong with me; I seem to have spent my whole life looking the wrong way.

I’m starting to think that life is little more than a series of doors: every day we have to choose which ones to open, which to walk through, and which to close behind us, leaving them forever locked.

When things don’t look right, sometimes you just have to change your perspective,

We lead the life we choose to, based on what we think we deserve, and we hold on to the memories that mean the most to us, the moments we believe shaped the life we lead now.

There’s no secret ladder to reach the stars; you have to learn to build your own, and when you fall, you have to be brave enough to start the climb again. Never look back, never look down.

Sometimes when we put someone on too high a pedestal, it only means they have farther to fall.