RUINED

RUINED.

That’s the word.

Ruined.

You selfish fucking asshole.

You couldn’t just leave. You couldn’t just walk away and let the past be the past.

You had to ruin it.

Every memory. Every laugh. Every inside joke. Every place. Every song.

Every goddamn thing.

Do you know what pisses me off?

It wasn’t yours.

None of it was yours.

Those memories belonged to me, too. That history belonged to me, too. But somehow your selfishness reached backward and got its filthy hands on things that should have been untouchable.

I was there. I lived those moments. I earned those memories.

And now every time I reach for one, there you are. Like a parasite. Like a disease. Like some toxic chemical that leaked into a reservoir and poisoned everything downstream.

I didn’t deserve that.

Nobody deserves that.

You don’t get to walk into someone’s life, take what you want, leave when you’re done, and act like the destruction isn’t real.

You don’t get to use people.

You don’t get to consume people.

You don’t get to treat human beings like disposable fucking napkins and then skip away whistling like nothing happened.

That’s what makes me so angry.

The selfishness.

The unbelievable selfishness.

The kind of selfishness that looks another human being in the eye, takes years of friendship, trust, loyalty, history, and memories, and says:

“Yeah. I don’t give a shit.”

So now I get to carry it.

I get to walk through the broken glass. I get to find your fingerprints on things that used to make me happy. I get to discover, over and over again, how much damage one selfish person can do when all they care about is themselves.

And the worst part?

You probably think you did nothing wrong.

That’s the kind of person you are.

A restaurant I used to love.

Ruined.

A song that used to make me smile.

Ruined.

Movies. Stories. Places.

Entire chapters of my life.

Ruined.

Not because they were bad. Not because the memories were fake. Not because the laughter wasn’t real.

Because every path back to them runs straight through you.

The people who get abandoned are usually the ones left doing all the homework.

The people who leave rarely sit around questioning themselves.

The people left behind become archaeologists, digging through every conversation, every text, every memory looking for the exact moment everything went to hell.

Ruined.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Meanwhile the person who left is already halfway down the highway.

For a long time, I thought that meant something about me.

Maybe I wasn’t enough.

Maybe I asked for too much.

Maybe I was too emotional. Too needy. Too intense. Too something.

Then one day a thought hit me that I wasn’t prepared for.

What if nothing was ruined?

What if you’re still a selfish son of a bitch?

What if you’re still exactly the person I think you are?

What if everything I said about your selfishness is true?

And what if none of that gives you ownership over my life?

Because the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

Not at you.

At myself.

How the hell did I hand you that much power?

How did I let one person’s selfish decision become the judge, jury, and executioner of entire decades of my life?

A song isn’t ruined because you’re attached to it.

A memory isn’t ruined because your face shows up in it.

You don’t own those things.

You never did.

The laughter was real before you became an asshole. The memories were real before you walked away. The good times were real before your selfishness exposed itself.

You didn’t create those moments by yourself.

I was there.

I brought something to them, too.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been missing all this time.

You didn’t ruin the memories.

You revealed yourself.

There’s a difference.

The memories are still standing.

You’re the thing that collapsed.

The restaurant is still there. The song still sounds the same. The joke is still funny. The sunset still happened. The road trip still happened. The friendship happened. The history happened.

All the things I thought you ruined are exactly where they’ve always been.

The only thing that’s changed is you.

You left.

You quit.

You walked away.

Ruined.

You became somebody I wouldn’t trust with a houseplant, much less my heart.

But the memories?

Those survived.

Turns out they were stronger than you.

And that realization pisses me off for a completely different reason.

Because I spent years treating you like some all-powerful force of destruction.

You weren’t.

You’re just another selfish asshole who left.

The memories stayed.

I stayed.

You’re the one who disappeared.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy.

Not the memories. Not the songs. Not the places. Not the jokes.

Those survived.

What didn’t survive was the possibility.

The possibility that one day we’d laugh about all of it again.

The possibility that we’d find our way back.

The possibility that the story wasn’t over.

For a long time, I confused that loss with everything else.

I thought the memories were ruined.

They weren’t.

I thought the history was ruined.

It wasn’t.

I thought the good times had somehow become less real because of what happened afterward.

They didn’t.

The only thing that was ruined was the future I imagined.

The version where things worked out.

The version where the friendship survived.

The version where loyalty meant the same thing to both of us.

That future is gone.

And some days, if I’m being honest, I still miss it.

I still wish things could have been different.

I still wish you had been different.

I still wish the person I thought you were had actually existed.

But wishing doesn’t change reality.

The memories are still mine.

The laughter is still mine.

The years are still mine.

You don’t get those.

Maybe that’s the cruelest part.

I still miss someone who no longer exists.

RUINED.