MATTHEW

I promised myself I wouldn’t look for you again.
And yet here I am, invoking you in thought—an apprentice alchemist trying to give you form.

All I can see, among shadows, is your shirt that still, damnably, smells like you.


I hold it, breathe it in, and collapse into tears because I miss you, because I still want you to be mine.

In the delirium of intrusive thoughts, I imagine sending you a message, writing a letter with the tragic elegance of the Renaissance ghost I’ve become.

It would begin like this:

I dedicate time against my will to write you these lines, with the calm of someone who has seen and survived the apocalypse three times.

Don’t ask me for forgiveness—I don’t need it.
But I hope that destroying me somehow healed you.
If hurting me brought you peace, if breaking me made you feel strong, then I hope it was worth it for you.
Because for me, it no longer means anything.

I carry no hatred, no thirst for revenge.


I’ve already walked through the rage, the tears, the sleepless nights asking what I did wrong.
And I understood—it wasn’t me.
It was you: your emptiness, your lack of self-love, your festering wounds you never dared to face.
You threw them all at me like stones.

I placed hope where you placed lies.
I placed patience where you placed indifference.
I placed devotion where you placed doubt.
So I no longer want apologies—only distance.
When someone destroys the one who only tried to love them right, no words can repair that.
The only cure is solitude: to rebuild oneself, to vow never again to mistake crumbs for love.

I don’t hate you, but I want you far.


I don’t want explanations.
I don’t want you to reach for me.
Forgiveness isn’t for you—it’s for me.
I forgive to keep walking, unburdened by your guilt or your story.

If you ever see me calm, don’t think I forgot—
I understood.


You can’t keep walking where you were shattered.
You can’t keep loving where you were made to feel not enough.

I don’t need your forgiveness.


I needed to release your name to return to myself—
and to go on doubting men like you.

You told me I was incredible.
But no one walks away from someone incredible.


So now I doubt myself instead of accepting that I was merely the victim of your lies—
your fantasies that needed a body to play them out.

All I have left is the intensity of what happened.
And I never wanted experiences that would make me hate being alive.
Yet you became one of them—the cruelest one of all.

Now, as the mediocre philosopher I am, I search for a verb to soothe me.


Because the freer the soul becomes, the more abstract existence feels.


It disgusts me to think how foolish I was to believe you.
But what’s done is done.
All I can do now is pick up the shattered pieces of my heart before someone else gets cut by them.

I truly wanted to love you.


I dreamed of Sunday mornings in your arms—
making coffee, making love while the milk boiled.


I didn’t fall in love with you; I fell in love with what you swore you were.
With promises you never kept.
With the way you vanished on the most important day of my life—
the day you turned into the worst of my existence.

The logic is simple: you changed your mind.
I don’t blame you.


But why lie?
Why stab me in the heart only to finish me off later?
I would’ve said yes to you anyway,
because of this cursed loneliness that keeps teaching me to love myself—
and therefore leaves me overflowing with love no one seems ready to receive.

You were starved of love, starved of a woman who’d find beauty in the hair on your chest,
who wouldn’t judge you for lifting crates of beer for a living.
I wanted to love you as you were, asking for nothing in return.

I believed we were meant for each other—or maybe I just decided to believe it.
And now what’s left?
An orgasm.
Your sweaty shirt still here.
And an existential doubt: was any of it worth it?

I wish I’d never met you.
I still need proof that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger—
that this pain deserves to be repeated in the eternal return.
That Amor Fati truly reigns.

Instead, I’m consumed by uncertainty.
Are you alive?
Do you feel guilt?
Or was I just a trophy to decorate your emptiness?

At this point, the only thing that could redeem you
is if you were dead—
or trapped by some medical condition that keeps you from texting me.

Unless, of course, you gave me a fake number.
And if so, then who receives this message now?

Damn the anguish of uncertainty!
It drives me insane not knowing the truth.
And what’s worse—absolute freedom mocks me.
I could look for you.
Or I could wait.
Both options are knives.

So many choices unfold before my eyes,
and freedom, so light at first, becomes heavier than Atlas himself when forced to choose.
The weight isn’t in freedom—it’s in not knowing what future each lost choice might have brought.

I love Nietzsche, but this time I can’t appeal to the will to power.
I refuse to become him—cold and bitter toward Salomé after rejection.
Once is enough.

You’ll remain, for me, a trap of fate,
a twenty-first century comedy of the soul.

I’ll rid myself of your shirt.
I’ll rearrange my house the way Regina Torino would—
placing the piano near the window,
writing you one or two songs.

This scar you left will remind me that not everyone is kind,
and that the worst anguish is the uncertainty of not knowing if I’m wrong about that.

In the meantime, enjoy your life.
I say it with the faintest desire that you find what you’re looking for.