Dear Me,

In my heart I always knew I cared about you.  I just never believed it.  I never believed it the way I never believed in myself.

I did wrong.  I knew your worth.  I was acutely aware of it.  Still, I refused to believe, I turned a blind eye.  It was selfish.  But like I said before, when you don't believe in yourself you'll do anything for approval.

I continue to live with the psychological repercussions of turning my back on you.  You were the only one really standing by my side; the only person whose opinion truly mattered.

Please believe me when I say my aim was once true.  When you met him, there was apprehension.  Something wasn't right and you felt it.  His falseness and unwarranted superiority resonated from within him, via a need for attention and his snide take on humanity.  It was jarring for you.  In reality, he was just scared as hell.  Scared you'd never care for him.  Scared no one would.  He needed you, so he opened his heart to you alone.  It was the softness he showed that gave you hope, drew you in.  After all, you needed love just as much as he did, for your own fucked up reasons.  The common thread remained; you both wanted to find love for yourselves from within each other.

The next couple months were divine weren't they?  Imbibed in lust and comfort, you relished in your desires and began to forget things.  Your attention to details of importance began to falter.  The foundation to the house you'd built began to sink.

Shakespeare gladly put it, "To thine own self be true."  Your greatest errors have been committed when not living by those words.  Admit fault.  Know that you became careless with him as I did with you.  You stopped doing those things that were important to you, in order to allot time for him.  You let life get in the way, lost a sense of yourself and clung to your crutch for love.  You became debilitated, disarmed from your best self.  You took his adoration as a given.  And when his interest in you died, a part of you died too.  True, he ultimately failed you, but more importantly, you failed yourself.  Losing self worth and ceasing to chase your destiny stripped you of your very essence.  You forgot how someone liked to be loved, all because you were too consumed by the love you were missing from within yourself.  The magic left and you allowed that.  You hadn't the courage to address it, for fear of losing him.  But soon after, he was still gone.

I betrayed you, through and through.  I placed others before you.  I placed lovers, parents, sisters before you.  I've failed to see your valor for some time now.  For this, I am sorry.  I commit to love you with honesty and without reproach.  I won't deny a lifetime of scorn will do something to the deepest level of your psyche, weaving itself into every extension of your being.  I've taken the whip to your back for a good 30 years.  The lashes ingrained within speak.  They say, "It's ok honey.  You're doing just fine.  You can stop now."

These difficulties come but not without a lesson, as I've come to regard you as the special, capable soul you really are.  I always felt it, the life inside you.  Perhaps this explains why I clung to the pain so long.  It made me truly feel alive.  Now I aim to make you feel alive by a nobler, more loving means.  I'll never stray so far from you, at least not for too long.