What If I’m Always The First To Leave?

By Heidi Liu
Thought Catalog - March 4, 2013

I need win the race because if I lose, well, then I Lose and I think again about what my best friend had once told me when we were children: “I just think that every time you love someone, even in the smallest way, you give them a bit of yourself. But we are finite beings and if you give too much away, you will have nothing left. Then, you will never be able to love again the way you can, now. And the idea of that is just so sad to me, to not feel anything.” So, to keep from running empty, I try to snatch back the pieces of myself that I had let you hold on to.

“It’s mine, give it back. I was just letting you borrow it for a while but I want it back now because I need it. It’s not for you.”

Burning bridges is my bad habit and perhaps the biggest problem of all is that I am really fucking good at it. Practice, I guess. So now, in the face of all these goodbyes I am about to embark upon, I say ugly things that I don’t mean. Even worse are the ugly things I say that I do mean, that I never said because I loved you but now, if I say them, it means I don’t love you anymore, right? I get too drunk and do ugly things like lie, or yell, or let go of your hand when you want me to teach you how to waltz on the balcony with a cigarette pressed between your pale lips that I used to kiss (it’s cold out tonight).

I look at you and you and you and I think to myself, I could have loved you, and then I think with morbid glee, but I won’t. There is not enough time for me to love any of you and so while it is all right for you to think I am interesting it is not all right for you to think anything beyond that. We are passing fancies so let’s not make it more than it is.