It’s different. We’re different.

We want such drastically different things in life. Even when we talk about it now, I have remained unwavering in my desires, and she has remained rooted in hers. So where does that leave us? Trying to cobble together a relationship while hundreds of miles apart? I know that I may need to stay here for a while, but if I can get away, I will do so as quickly as possible. I will go anywhere that isn't my home... anywhere she isn't. 

She wants to be around her family so badly, to stay with them and protect her younger siblings from the things surrounding them, but I'm the youngest. I have no one to care for, in fact they all care for me instead and sometimes it's almost stifling. I am my own person, away from my family, and certainly away from her. And can I be that person if I stay? No, I know I cannot. 

What would it mean to leave her? It would mean being "another one" that does so. She drunkenly cried to me that I can't leave, because everyone else does. Everyone leaves her and so it must be her fault and in that moment, I had my first inkling of doubt. Is this really what she thinks? And why is she telling me? Now I feel like I'm a small mouse and if I take the cheese, I'll be caught, but if I walk away, what then? I'm just "everyone else" now? She can't box me in with everyone, I have every right to leave her if I so wish to. However, there is a guilt that won't leave. She doesn't remember that night, she was too inebriated to remember, but I do. And in my honeymoon eyes and love-infected heart I told her about it, so she is aware that she spilled her guts. I felt manipulated. I perhaps would have ended it then, as I stayed up with her and was exhausted but I let her stay anyways. Why? 

I have put her before myself so often that I am beginning to wonder where she ends and I begin. Do I have any autonomy anymore? Am I actually myself, or am I myself alongside her? I want to leave and she wants to stay, and some small part of me thinks, maybe I can stay with her. 

Can I stay here for her? Simply–no. I must get out, this glass cage that has called itself my home has been suffocating me for two decades and if I'm unable to leave then I will forever hate myself. I will get stuck, and I refuse to get stuck. I know, for certain, that if she were to ask me to stay and I did, I would hate and resent her forever because of it. I would blame her for my unhappiness, I would blame her for my shortcomings, and I would blame her for my deteriorating self worth. I would hate her, with no love left.