I Was Never Yours
Song: Cherry by Chromatics
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives. — Isaiah 61:1
There are people who love the idea of someone long before they are capable of loving them in full. They become a symbol before they are allowed to be a person. The comfort they provide, the stability they anchor, the admiration they mirror. They are cherished not for who they are when no one is watching, but for how well they fit into a role already written.
And someone who speaks with clarity exposes the limits of that kind of control — control, not love, is what they fear losing. When the bitterness becomes consumable — when they recognize that you are not a thing but a somebody — they move on, choosing a replacement. And still, despite all their scheming and manipulation, they fail at the one thing they want the most: closeness.
I still find myself thinking back to the park, to the time when I was twenty. The moon hung low, brushing everything in pale silver. Noah came over. He looked tired. We traded words that never broke the surface. I understood the shallowness of it — sometimes emptiness itself is what a person leans on just to keep going. It asks less of you than grief, hope, anger, and love.
Suddenly, I said something that might have caught him off guard. His response was always predictable: he would never give me anything meaningful — maybe just crayons and a coloring book, and I laughed, because after six or seven months with him, he no longer affected me. I knew what he was really saying — if you listened closely. His words were never just words; they were signals, revealing the limits he had already set for himself — and for anyone who came too close.
Perhaps he wanted to be seen without having to see me, to occupy my space without ever meeting my eyes. Perhaps he needed proof that he was not the villain, a way to measure himself against my patience, my tolerance, my stillness. Perhaps leaving would mean admitting he chose wrong, and that the admission would cost more than he could bear — so he lingered, hovering, carrying absence beneath his ribs like a secret.
If you listened closely, he was saying that generosity was nothing more than a tool. Not kindness. Not love. Not care — but leverage. A way to take what he had never truly earned, to mask the emptiness beneath the gesture, and to downplay what he had already taken and given at once: time, sex, emotional labor. All of it revealed a projection of his own inadequacy, a method for sidestepping responsibility and expectation.
A way of saying one thing while doing another.
He had no trouble tearing me down and then lifting me up, depending on what he wanted, always when it suited him. It was about control — about deflection, about envy, about shaping the narrative of the relationship entirely around his limitations.
And there is nothing more damaging than someone who sets the terms for something as simple, and as fundamental, as giving. But let him taste his own cruelty, and the crown slips — because as I kept moving, he fell farther and farther into somebody that was no longer real.
I had all the leverage to strike, but I refused to use it. Though I held the tools to unsettle him, I chose restraint over force. Because within me, I thought I loved him. And when the love I carried went void, Jordan — our friend then — welcomed it nonetheless.
Despite his own brokenness, there was a gentleness in Jordan I rarely saw elsewhere. I remember being exhausted, my body heavy from staying up all night with Noah, yet somehow, I was driving somewhere intimate with him. We stopped, and I looked up at the sunroof while he asked me to look at him. I was weighed down by guilt because I knew Jordan occupied my thoughts. It was not just that he lingered in my mind — he did so insistently. When I was with Noah, my thoughts drifted to Jordan. When I was with Jordan, my mind wandered back to Noah. I was trapped in a cycle of longing and distraction, caught between two people, and I desperately needed someone to save me from my own relentless attachment.
I found myself caught between two very different kinds of men. One was broken but carried a sense of humanity — imperfect in how he loved, marked by mistakes, yet somehow still knowing how to care. The other desperately wanted closeness, but his insecurity kept him from functioning in a healthy way, as if he wanted intimacy more than he knew how to handle it. By the time I got to the other side of all of it, Noah began to sense that something was off, that my heart was not fully present with him anymore. He could feel the distance, the way my eyes looked outside the window, even when my body was beside him. And in the background of it all, Jordan was feeding his own version of the story into his ear.
After everything had fallen apart and the words had dried up, I found myself standing at thee front door, kissing Noah goodbye, heart heavy, feeling the first dull edges of numbness settle over me. I was slipping into that strange, hazy space where pain and relief coexisted, where you feel tired not because you have rested, but because you have finally stopped fighting long enough to feel the exhaustion. I began to ignore Jordan’s phone calls — not out of anger, but out of a desperate need to protect what was left of me — even though Noah was still in contact with Mia and accidentally sent me a text meant for someone else. I could have addressed it, but I chose not to because I was already planning my exit.
Most men refuse to see that mistreatment leaves space for someone else to care, because people notice, and those who truly know you will protect you — even in silence, especially when you are quietly sending proof to others who are watching and offering support privately to keep the peace.
It was embarrassing—mutual friends were watching as he casually commented on another woman’s attractiveness while sitting next to me in the car. He became that poorly mannered boy — undisciplined, careless, and unaware of how ugly he sounded. At this point, Noah wanted to hurt me. It was not brokenness that drove him, because Jordan was broken too, and he never turned that pain into a weapon, but I saw in them the very traits I never wanted to embody — the longing, the constant seeking of validation — yet here I was, unconsciously picking up those same wounds and reflexes, as if emotional pain were something you could catch simply by caring too much. And this, I came to understand, is what soul ties do: they bind you so tightly to another that you begin to dissolve, piece by piece, until the edges of your own identity blur and fade. You lose yourself in the process, not with fanfare or fireworks, but in those moments of caring too much, holding on too long, and giving more than you have left to give.
Stubbornness is hardly flattering when a person lacks the awareness to see that the traps they fall into are of their own making. There is nothing flattering — nothing redeeming — about being with someone, not because of love, but simply because they ran out of all options and so have you. It becomes less about us and more about something to hold onto. What begins as desperation easily becomes resignation: settling not from desire but from fear of being alone, fear of uncertainty, and fear of starting over. But that is not the part about Noah I want to expose. That is not the part that troubled me neither the part that drove me to walk away permanently.
What unsettled me was something deeper, something more telling about his character: his willingness to fake belonging. It was not mere dislike or conflict that pushed me away; it was the realization that he could be present without being real. So willing to mask his true self made it impossible for me to feel grounded, to trust the reality of any interaction. And so I left — not because of what he said, or even what he did, but because of what he chose not to be, and the unsettling way he could pretend that did not matter.
It revealed his capacity — and, I would even say, his perversion — for desiring Mia who did not want him, while expecting her to cling to him, even as he entertained me. I left mentally first, long before anyone noticed. Then I pulled away emotionally. By the time I finally said I was done, the decision had already been made in every way that mattered. I could see the situation as it truly was, without hope distorting it, without excuses softening the truth. And once I saw it that way, there was no going back.
It exposed a kind of selfishness that was not just reckless but damaging, a disregard for the boundaries and feelings of those around him. It was a portrait of a man who repeatedly made poor choices, who seemed unable — or unwilling — to consider the consequences of his desires. Beneath it all, there was a sense of entitlement: a belief that he could take from others what he had not earned, and that he could demand both loyalty and affection without giving any of it.
Three years ago, when I confronted him, it proved to be the best choice. It forced him to close the gap created by uncertainty in his own current relationship, to confront the cracks in his own ego. Some people never learn how to love without inventory. They move through others the way one moves through rooms, noting what can be taken, what can be stored, what might be useful later. Affection becomes a transaction. People are reduced to resources — emotional wells, mirrors, shelter from their own emptiness. So they learn another way of keeping you. Not with presence, not with care, but with surveillance. They step back, withdraw their voice, their body — yet remain just close enough to watch.
Monitoring preserves the illusion. It says: I do not have to touch you to claim you. I do not have to speak to you to matter to you. It allows them to avoid the risk of accountability while feeding on the comfort of relevance. You are no longer a person to them, but a position they once occupied. And you feel it — being monitored by someone who refuses to know you. An absence that still insists on presence. A stare without responsibility. It was a slow, deliberate persistence — allowing the patterns, the inconsistencies, and the small betrayals to pile up — so that when the real exposing finally happened, people could see clearly who had been orchestrating the game.
By walking away, I set clear psychological boundaries: people are watching, and if you cross them, you risk losing everything, because reactive performance — driven by social and emotional cues rather than genuine desire — does not work with me. People want the stage only when it benefits them, not when it exposes the fractures in their own foundation caused by attacking one person. Every attempt to match what I represented, every effort Noah made to imitate or compete with what I used to be, became a mirror reflecting his own inadequacies. He did not see my strength as something to learn from — he saw it as something to replicate, as though by copying me he might fill the gap between who he was and who he wished to be.
I knew I would always be cast as the bad guy in his story — no matter what I said or did. When someone avoids responsibility and shifts blame onto you, it becomes the lens through which every interaction is judged. He projected them onto me, turning every boundary I set or honest word I spoke into proof that I was the problem. What should have been shared accountability became a battlefield where my presence was the enemy and my strength was ground he thought he needed to overpower. It was not spiritual power in any noble sense, it was the hard reality that when someone avoids responsibility and shifts blame, the only way they yield is when they no longer have anything left to push against. They eventually stop denying responsibility when there is no one or nothing left to push the blame onto, and then, the real questions come in as to why they acted that way in the first place, because really there was no reason, especially if they were doing the same things.
The more he tried, the more obvious it became that he was avoiding himself. His struggle was not about becoming better; it was about proving he could be like me — and in that race he continually tripped over his own limitations, trying to recreate something that was never his to begin with. He was following a script, performing the songs without touching its heart. The sound went on, persistent and stubborn, but it carried no resonance — just someone trying to make order out of something that had long since slipped through his fingers.
So when he said he would not gift me anything meaningful, he only revealed that he had nothing meaningful to give. At the park, I remember the conversation clearly: we were standing in a corner near an exit door, his legs crossed, his jacket still on as he settled into comfort. I remember thinking:
No matter who you become or where life takes you, in the choices you make, and in the moments when silence speaks louder than words, I will remain — a reminder of what was truly real. Because even in pushing Noah away, I meant every bit of it. Choosing Jordan — I meant it. Removing Jordan, after he started acting foul — I meant that too.
Every choice, and every ending — I meant it.