hate to love or love to hate
Love to hate or hate to love?
hate does not grow where love has never lived.
you cannot truly hate a stranger.
hate is love's ghost—
a wound that still remembers
the shape of the knife.
and when love finally dies,
hate does not remain to mourn it.
it fades.
it hollows itself out.
it becomes silence.
the kind of silence
that feels nothing at all.
so yes, Vega,
I hate you.
but I will never forgive you.
because forgiveness is a burial.
it is laying flowers
on the grave of what once was.
it is turning away.
it is teaching your heart
to forget the sound of a name.
and I am not ready
to make a cemetery of you.
so I will keep my distance.
I will build oceans between us.
I will choose absence
again and again and again.
because no matter how fiercely
I carry this love-shaped anger,
I cannot stand beside
the person you became.
instead,
I will love the constellation
I drew from your light—
the version of you
that existed only
in the sky of my imagination.
and I will hate
the flesh-and-blood truth
that shattered it.
one of them taught me how to dream.
the other taught me why dreams end.
and so I leave.
not because I stopped loving you,
but because sometimes
the only way to keep loving a ghost
is to stop chasing the person
who buried it.
I won't come back.
and you will remain
not in my hands,
not in my life,
but buried somewhere beneath my ribs,
until they bury me too.
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