I wrote you a letter the night before last. It was harsh and melodramatic but those are just two of the stupid things you’ve made me.
I guess a part of me wants to believe that if you read it, the written words would peel away from the page and slice into you, cutting you deep. Deep enough that they would scar; and every day you would see the marred flesh and remember me – because you have forgotten me, I know you have. Even when we talk, you don’t really care. It’s a one-sided, loveless conversation, carried on only by myself and my desperate attempts to become part of your life again.

I want to worm my way back in, like a disgusting parasite. I want to bite through the thick skin you’ve created to bar me from you, I want to sneak into your blood and feed on the happiness that you feel when you look at her. The happiness that is transferred to her lips through your own – a sweet, pink light – or whatever the colour of such deep love is – whatever it is, it makes me feel sick. It’s too much for me. I want to invade your soul and suck the happiness from you, and the love that she stole from me, until you are nought but an empty husk of what you once were, because I liked the you that I had, not the you that was taken from me.

In a way, you were my doll – mine to dress and speak to and love – but I always had to give you back. I had to share you and I thought I was fine with that because you were her doll but only I knew that you could speak to me. We were cheating her and it felt amazing. We shared a love that you told me was so much greater than that you received from her and to me, that was enough to soothe the wounds caused by knowing I couldn’t keep you for my own. Each loving word and each promise was a balm to the stinging cuts that burnt my flesh whenever my eyes – made green by a twisted, deep envy – would accidentally find themselves drawn to a photo of the two of you. In a strange fit of masochism, I would stare longingly at each tender scene captured by thousands of megapixels, of the two of you sharing an embrace or a kiss. Each tiny little pixel would burn through my watering eyes and embed itself, a tiny grain of a memory, into the muscle of my heart.

It would always remind me that each memory you made with her was one I should have been a part of but I could not be her and I could not own you like I wanted to.

In a sense, she and I are the same person. We have the same interests, the same sense of humour and the same love for you. Perhaps it was not you who were my doll, but I who was yours. Maybe I was your foolish puppet – the first toy, the first being to be the receiver of your love and infatuation, your sweet, clever words and your endless affection. Then you realised that fate had put me, your favourite little toy, on the top shelf. Distance meant that you could not reach me with your searching hands and desperate lips. You could not play with me as you wished to, could not hold me like you wished to. My patchwork heart, sitting deep inside an empty chest, tore apart stitch by stitch when you found solace and companionship in another toy. With dull eyes, unused to seeing such sights, I watched as the shiny new toy, the latest version of myself was adored by you, loved by you.

I was still your favourite, once the honeymoon period had passed. I was still the one who listened to your darkest secrets, your real thoughts. All her dainty little ears picked up on was the subtle undertones of a solid friendship that you shared with me. She had no idea because you were so secretive and all your secrets belonged to me anyway. When you were together, the time you spent with each other was so happy, so blissful – I could see this in your frozen smile on the photographs, the light in your eyes captured by the flash of the camera.

If we were closer, she would be forgotten. She would be the discarded doll, lying bruised and forgotten in the dump, at the bottom of the pile because she was no longer needed to heal the pain of my absence. No-one would even remember her name. Instead, I am forgotten, but you were not so gracious as to allow me to decompose far, far away. No, she would not let me cut my puppet strings and drift away in a strong wind to a place where my dull, lifeless envy-green eyes could not find their way to your happy matrimony. I tried to break free but she tugged me back with guilt-laced words and a fake, sweet sadness and sense of sympathy.

At first, even you did not want me to go.

“Let’s try again in a few months. I’ll still love you.”

Those words stabbed at me and I feebly agreed, weak from crying and despair.

“I’ll never stop saying ‘I love you’,” you promised, and my foolish stuffing-base doll brain let me believe you. “And I’ll never stop meaning it.”

And then you did.

You stopped and you broke your promise. It now lies shattered on my bedroom floor, the sharp shards splattered with red, red blood that spilled when those pieces of broken glass embedded themselves in my thin, fragile skin.

That is why, if you ever read this – instead of the written letter that I will never send because you don’t deserve it and I can’t see past my anger and hurt to post the stupid paper anyway – I want these words to pierce through your eyes like needles, to crackle through your blood and crash into your heart, burning you from the inside out. I want each bitter drop of my resent and each dark rivulet of guilt to cut open your skin and mark it with the damage you have done.

I want it to leave scars that will never heal completely – that will always itch if a thought of me crosses your deluded, walled-off mind.

I want the memory of me to never leave you, to poison your mind and change you completely until you come back to me for comfort and forgiveness.

Maybe I won’t want you then.

But that won’t matter, because you’ll be so damaged..

as damaged as you made me – the level of pain that has made me forever yours -

and then you, my broken, burned, bruised and bleeding doll, will be forever mine.