I Don’t Love You Anymore

Saying that about a friend used to really scare me but now it doesn’t. I don’t love you anymore: it’s a fact and it’s not even cold or hard. It doesn’t scare me anymore because it’s just the truth. I don’t love you anymore. You and I are cut.

Relationships are something I’ve always been bad at but friendships are something I’ve always been proud of. I never really thought a friend could do something I wouldn’t forgive them for, something I wouldn’t be there to pick up the pieces after, anything we do to fuck things up with the people we care about the most. Platonic love has always felt stronger than romantic love because that’s what constructs our core. You had no selfish reasons to put up with my fuck ups but you put up with them anyway because you loved me and I loved you back.

But you didn’t love me enough, I guess, and now I don’t love you either.

Your girlfriend has a habit of going through your electronics so you used to write me letters. She thought there was something going on between us and she didn’t trust you. (It’s always a stupid reason like that.) You could have stood up for us but you didn’t. The worst that would have happened was you’d be single. This is how I know you didn’t love me enough: because you and I weren’t worth enough to fight for. Eventually you stopped writing me letters.

I always hate when people say “you never really loved me” at the end of a relationship because that’s almost never the case. But at the end of a friendship it almost always is.

I don’t love you anymore because I’m not important to you and you give me nothing. Maybe saying that makes me a selfish person but I no longer care.

We like to talk about love like it’s unconditional but there is probably nothing more conditional than love. There’s no point in having love for someone who doesn’t want it. There’s no point in putting endless energy into someone who has nothing but empty words for you and not even that, someone it makes no difference to whether you wake up in the morning, or don’t. We are not hardwired. We are not absolutes.

Memory is not enough to sustain love and that’s another reason I don’t love you anymore.

I don’t love you anymore because if I were to love you I’d be loving the person you were then and not who you are now, the you who used to love me, the friend I remember who’s died since and you no longer know me. If I were to speak to you you’d turn a blank face. Your cells have regenerated since I spoke to you last, you’re not in there anymore and I’m talking to a stranger.

I’m talking to myself again.