When anger returns, I often think of you. You are the one thing I am still angry at myself for. So much happened to me—so much harm, so much pain—but you took much of the buildup. I regret that day. I was never mad at you. You were not at fault for wanting to love me, but I couldn’t allow you to seal yourself to me. I did love you. I am fairly certain I always will. But you were always made of stronger stuff than I, and I knew that as I’d succumb to my mind, you’d care for me. Not in the supposed way my father had for my mother, but in the way I had for her. But caring for someone who is no longer capable of offering love is a terrible sentence. One I would have spent my life on had she lived. One I will spend a lifetime trying to heal from. A fate I could never subject you to. Maybe in another life we spent it far from the maddening of this world. Maybe there I could keep my mind clear. Maybe there I could love you without fear. Wooded and free. You seem happier now, and for that, I am grateful, despite the ache in hollow chest. Because it is me. The only ire is me, is at my fate as my mother’s daughter, something two decades of care could not wash from me. I resent my fate, if only for the fact that it prevented us.
But you will love, and I will live, mind or not.