THE MEN I HATE

This one is different: let me tell you about the men who broke my heart.

The ones who reach their ghost hands into the cavity of my chest, play Mahjong with my guts, then continue to exist around me like I never bled.

Here are the ones with blood on their hands:

My father, and the countless times he could let me down as one. When I was a child, I left him a scrap book filled with stickers, hand-cut print outs of Rufus from Kim Possible and Totally Spies (I had hoped the girls would pique his attention) - telling him I loved him and that I wished he would stop smoking. When I was an adult and I told him I’d be happy to help him create a CV so he could apply to be an instructor instead of selling houses to people he desperately wanted to be like, and getting ditched by passengers as a ride hailing driver. My scrap book was left drying by the air conditioner, and in my hazy memory, it ended up in the bin. By him or me, I can’t remember. My message was left unread, my follow-up with listings of jobs he could apply to, also unread.

My brother. And the fucking shit he has said to me, the hot tea he emptied on me in a restaurant, the way I had to drive my mother and her shredded arm to the hospital while he had a relative apologise to me on his behalf. I have called him horrible things in my head, but to his face - only aggressive vulgarities and any form of onomatopoeia I can muster to get him out of my way. He has called me chopped, fat, dirty, smelly, a bitch. He has said that no one cared about me, and that he would rather follow my then-influencer friends. His voice is the voice I put on when I hate myself. He is six years younger than me, and he has always blamed me for robbing him of a big sister he felt he deserved. He is so young, and in his voice, it is always my fault that he is the way he is. Last year, my boyfriend took me to the drain outside my childhood home and we burnt the drawings and letters he gave to me when we were kids that I still kept taped up in my bedroom. Slowly, it is easier to tell the parts of me that hate myself to shut up and disappear because they all sound like him and I can’t stand his voice.

The first guy I convinced myself I loved in secondary school. That warped love that springs up from a girl who is allowed to spend time with a boy alone. The kind of familiar pain I wrote myself into when he started dating my best friend and stopped caring about me. The kind of boy who uses girls. The kind of best guy friend who would never really apologise, and would tell other people who asked if we ever reconnected, “I don’t think she wants to speak to me.” You’re wrong. I wanted so much, and for so long, for you to stop pretending. I wanted to see us grow old as people, not just some random side profile I would sneak glances at. Now he makes me laugh. His name, his face, his beautiful wife - I laugh because we never had to cross paths in this life, but we did and I hated it.

The idiot I slept with after our first date and let stay over, let cook for me, let deliver food to me while I was at work, let watch me take work calls while lying naked in bed, let look at me over a table, let take my sex toys for my own good, let tell me I had to see a doctor for never being able to orgasm with him, let look at me like he liked me but disappeared without a trace to meet his ex I saw send him a voice message to on his father’s Tesla screen, let drunk text me for another hook up three months later.

I cried for the idiot the most, days on end. I was so lonely in my chasm of heartbreak that I sat on my mother’s bed the day I broke things off with him and cried and cried and cried. Other than making me cry herself, my mother had never seen me cry over anyone before. And that night, she didn’t laugh at me for hurting so much over a man I only dated for less than a month - only asked why he would have another woman when he made me exclusively his.

Maybe it is in our upbringing as women to experience being used and shared by a man. Maybe my mother knew in more faces than one, that love is not a good thing if applied carelessly, even when it very much feels like a good thing.

I wrote ‘back to me’ when I was 19. I had never felt love, and I would crave the feeling I thought I didn’t deserve until I turned 28. You only love yourself the way others have loved you, and I have loved myself like the men who shared me have loved me.

Heartbreak is what they say to gaslight girls into accepting anything less than pure, respectful love from boys. I’m sure boys do experience heartbreak too, just in different colours than I have. But I have not been able to stomach a song about yearning or unrequited love since the night I cried to my mother