For years, you tortured me with your abuse and gaslighting. For years, my value to you and myself hinged on the abuse, hurt, and pain you constantly dished out: unless I was feeling the pain and suffering you subjected me to, you deemed me not entitled to exist. You said my purpose was to be miserable, my core identity and happiness dependent on you and your manipulative whims. You sickeningly found yourself and your power in causing me and watching me to self-destruct before your very eyes. Every day, you found more ways and more creative ways to diminish me into a crying, tormented, delusional object under your spell. I was your punching bag, your piece of property devoid of any compassion, concern, or humanistic consideration either from you or myself. I was deliriously hooked on the abuse like a drug, needing it in order to live through the day. I searched for you, for it, all the time.

And now, I have finally let you go. Not because I’ve had enough, or that I have nothing left in me to take the increasingly demented ways you rob me of my sanity. But--of all reasons--because if we stay this way, someone will be hurt. And I’m not going to allow myself to, not knowingly, hurt another.

So I have to set you free. But still living in the invisible cage you’ve built for me, in the invisible shackles, in the invisible chains, for now. The pain very real--not only from the loss of you, but mainly from having to be sentient again, having to be aware and cognizant of my needs, having to find a way to alter my state of mind in order to look outward, and ahead…and eventually and hopefully, move forward as I enter the next blank space.