I can’t remember the first time I said it, but I know it started when things were light, when love was still blossoming. Like a rose cut from the garden before it blooms, and the petals are just starting to fold out of their budding form, I would ask him to tell me. A childlike request that validated the want and desire I was already feeling for the first time when he spoke to me.

I’ve talked about the way my memory works before-how it tends to prioritize the bad over the good. I can’t remember the little things he would tell me in the beginning. All I can grasp is brief clips of my head pushing deeper into his arms when he would tell me or the flash of a grin across his face and feeling my lips turn that way in return. I can feel a sense of warmth but I can’t quite grab the actual words themselves.

The first response that became stained into my memory was September of 2023.

“I don’t think I’m in love with you anymore” was freshly floating in the air that I was struggling to breathe. I sat in the tiny bathroom near the front door after he left, knees to my chest as I tried to figure out what my life could possibly turn into without him in it. I held him so tightly before he walked out the door, told him all the things I saw in him. I told him he wasn’t a bad person, that it was my fault. I told him that he was going to be happy, that everything would be okay. I replayed it over and over in my head for what felt like hours before I picked up the phone and called him. I had told him I would delete his number, that I would leave him alone while he found himself, knowing what he said might happen. I agreed to wait as long as it took for him to come back to me, if he ever wanted to again.

But I hadn’t deleted it yet. I called him and through choked sobs, I told him I would leave him alone, if he could just tell me one thing. “Can you tell me something sweet?” were the words that tumbled from my lips, as my entire body shook with sorrow and desperation.

He told me that I had shown him the rawest form of love he had ever known. That I was a fighter, that the world had been shitting on me since the moment I opened my eyes and yet I still chose to live. That I still chose to trust. He told me that my strength to keep going was pure, and that because I had such a big heart, that he knew it would be a lifetime of heartbreak ahead of me if I continued to wear it as openly as I did. He told me I was precious.

I spent a month after that trying to get my shit together. I wrote my first blog post. I got sober. I cooked, I cleaned, I tried to live in the waiting I had created for myself. I tried to be someone he would want to come back to. I held onto his response and used it as fuel to be that person he saw in me, and to choose to live when I felt so dead inside.

That is the only time I can remember that question being something that actually gave me hope.

From that moment on, I used that question from a different place, for a very different reason.

I started asking it when my life became a roller coaster. Small glimmers of light were constantly extinguished as I plummeted into darkness that hours, days, or weeks of disregard and criticism left me in, reeling for some sort of hope to hold on to. I asked, curled up on that hotel bed when I didn’t think I could hear one more word about everything that was wrong with me because I needed an escape from the chaos and torment.

The request turned into a desperate cry for relief. I was begging for anything I could replay in my head that wasn’t about what a failure I was, no matter how hard I tried. Something to stand as a shield between the words spat at me in disgust and resentment that were coming from the person I wanted to be good enough for most. Something to keep me standing when I was being pushed deeper and deeper into the ground.

It evolved further into an unspoken sign of defeat between us. My defeat. I could never stop pushing back against the things that seemed so opposite of love inside me. I would fight back against signs of deception, disrespect or disregard even though I knew the pain that would follow, no matter how badly I tried to stay silent.

But every time, I would end up broken, the strength that the anger against those things had given me, replaced with confusion on if I was even well enough to judge someone’s actions. The doubt that would be created in my head against my own character would rise up stronger than the self protection I was trying to enforce, and I would be left once again, knees to my chest, unable to breathe, longing for the pain to be over.

I remember sitting in the car, after a night of complete and total collapse, after screaming into the floor and fighting back the demons that were created by his words, after being unable to calm down and begging him to come at 4 am and just hold me. I begged him to just tell me everything was okay, that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t deserve the way he had treated me, even if he didn’t mean it. The next morning I woke up next to him and I was so happy. The relief that followed the destruction was like pure dopamine for my brain and I struggled deeply being able to function without it. I got dressed up. I found someone to watch the kids. We were going to get Wawa breakfast, listen to Vultures 2, and just drive around and enjoy the time we had together. But by the time we had gotten our food, it had already been ripped away. The blame had begun, and I was left confused and heartbroken that I had once again lost that moment of calm I needed so badly. We rode around after he pulled back into the driveway and I begged him to back up because I was afraid for anyone to see the state of hysteria I had fallen into. I can remember pieces of the landscape that he drove past as he told me all the ways my grief was “bad behavior”. That I was the cause of every problem, that if I could just learn to act right, this wouldn’t be happening to me.

And so was born the unspoken agreement. I was curled as far into the passenger door as I could get. The rim of my shirt and my face were soaked with tears as I finally stopped fighting. I spoke the words into the silence that had begun to creep over us as I asked, “tell me something sweet”.

That became my white flag. When I said that, he knew I was done. He knew I had stopped caring about whatever had originally hurt me because the pain of speaking it out loud to him and the punishment I received had become even greater. He knew I was ready to be quiet. He knew I was ready to do whatever it took to make it stop, and to feel like I was safe again.

There were so many times where I begged just for a word of kindness. I would sob and shake and beg him to just say one thing about me that was good.

But even in my defeat, even in my acceptance and letting go of whatever it was that I wasn’t valid in feeling in his eyes, the responses became colder and colder.

He didn’t have anything left to say. His words became shallow and redundant. I would ask again, and again and again sometimes just to try and feel something real. But it stopped coming.

There was nothing left to say.

I would be lying if I told you that if I saw his face those words would not immediately come to my head to speak to him. Even now, the depth of desire I have to hear something he loved about me, or saw in me that was good, is unchanged.

Tell me something sweet. Tell me I wasn’t just sick. Tell me I had a right to feel the way I did. Tell me you know I loved you with everything I had.

Tell me I didn’t deserve what I went through.

Tell me part of you actually loved me at the end.

Those words are like bitter chocolate in my mouth now. The desire for something satisfying, only to be left with wiping my tongue off with a rag.

But to hear it one more time…

would be pretending.

I lost my imagination a long time ago.