Oh you don’t have to carry the guilt

Oh you don’t have to carry the guilt or to blame yourself for hurting others, they say.

and I smile because I wish that landed somewhere in me. I can’t, my friend. you are looking at me but you are not seeing what I am seeing, and that is not your fault, you were not there, you did not live what I lived, you came into my life somewhere in the middle of the story and missed everything that happened before the page you opened on.

It is strange, the way time splits the people who know you. the ones who are new don’t carry the weight of who you were. and the ones who left never got to see who you became. so you exist in pieces across different people’s memories, and none of them hold the whole thing. I have hurt people. not strangers in the abstract, real ones, people I loved, people who trusted me with something soft in themselves.

I was careless, I genuinely could not feel the edges of other people, could not locate where I ended and where their pain began. so I moved through them without noticing the damage. it was not malicious, It wasn’t intentional. but it was mine.

I cut people off. I left them sitting with silence I handed them and never explained. I walked away and they stayed there, holding a confusion I created and gave them no tools to untangle. sorry doesn’t reach that far back. sorry doesn’t give them their nights back, the ones they spent trying to make sense of something that was simply me being who I was then.

And when you look at me now with those hopeful eyes, when you say it was not your fault with that relief in your voice like you have saved me from something, I feel a fear I don’t know how to name. I am afraid you will decide I am good. being careful now is not the same as being good, it is just me refusing to become that again, it is damage control dressed up as growth. and I genuinely do not know, I have turned the question over so many times, I still do not know if I am a good person or simply a harmful one who learned to slow down.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​