To The Boy Who Wanted To See My Scars. And Flinched. #LettersToMyEx

Great loves are supposed to be about baring your heart and soul to each other. But what happens when one person can’t take the very sight of the scars?

We idolise love stories, but some of them fall apart too. 

Bestselling author Nikita Singh’s latest novel, Letters To My Ex is all about one such love story. Taking our cue from this novel, we asked readers to send us their own letter to an ex. The best eight are being published here, and win a copy of the book as well as a shopping voucher for Rs.300. Get your own copy here, of Letters To My Ex and curl up with a bittersweet read this February!

Hi.

We need to talk. I write to you instead because I don’t know when you will turn up next. The distance between us keeps widening day by day. I know that you see it too.

I know that you thought that you had signed up for a girl as baggage-free as she could be – someone who would accept your baggage without complaints and smile with you through the day. You didn’t know that I was a girl who would flinch when touched. You didn’t know that nightmares would wake me up, that I would spend the rest of the night with open eyes, staring at the ceiling, afraid to fall asleep.

I didn’t know that the things you would say would bring a barrage of memories and that the only thing I could do then was to close myself up for a while. I was never going to put what happened in my past to words – in my head, I was dealing well with it and it was never my fault. But the moment you felt like something was off, you asked and then pestered me to tell you. You made me believe that you would stay no matter what it was.

You made me open my bandages. You flinched at the sight of my wounds and threw up at a corner. I was the definition of the word disgusting. I was no more the nice, breezy girl you had seen from a distance. You would leave for days together to get your head around what you had seen. And I – I would bleed through these wounds that you made me put out in the open and from the betrayal that you had become.

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You would come back again, trying to comfort me. By then I would have bandaged myself. I would be ready to listen to your plight. This kept happening , didn’t it?

Maybe it wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t take it. What happened to me wasn’t my fault either. I was a child. I didn’t know what was being done to me. I did not ask for it. It is pathetic that I even need to put this into words for you to understand . It is sad that you couldn’t formulate this thought on your own.

The more you left, the thicker my walls became. The last time we met, you complained that you felt like you couldn’t get across to me. Even though I told you that you were imagining things, the reason you can’t find the door in, is because I have sealed it with bricks, steel and concrete. I cannot have somebody asking me to jump and then watch him move away every time I am about to fall.

The number of times you left, the retching sounds, the momentary look of disgust – these are reasons enough to shut me up about myself for the rest of my life. My molester was right after all – people will not believe me. They will not understand.

So thank you for leaving – I learnt to stem the bleeding in my wounds on my own. Thank you for giving me a life lesson on how ‘people falling in love with your scars’ is a myth. I am sorry that I even let you into my life. I shouldn’t have.

This is where it ends.

Good luck with your life.

You can view our entire #LettersToMyEx series here.

Image Source- Unsplash

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