I wanna tell y’all a story. It’s the story I experience when I listen to the song Pine Barrens by Jakey. I recommend listening to it yourself to experience your own story before I share mine. Feel free to continue, but do know that this will discuss self harm, trauma, emotional abuse, and destructive relationships.

Have you ever been dangerously in love? I don’t mean like a passionate crush, or being attracted to a bad boy, or getting sucked into someone’s destructive life. I mean the kind of love that hurts you to be in it. The kind that leaves wounds in your heart and makes you spit up trust and intimacy like bloody phlegm. Not the Romeo and Juliet love that’d make you break curfew and go against your family’s wishes. The Romeo and Juliet love that causes you to slice open your wrists at the mere thought about being taken away from them, sending your families into a spiral of grief and pain they can’t recover from.

I’ve felt that love before, a couple times, and each time prefaced the worst periods of my life. But it’s not just dangerous because of what it can do. It’s dangerous because every single time I couldn’t stop myself. It was like an addiction, pulling me in deep and swallowing my life whole, just to spit me out a couple months later, broken and shivering alone in the cold. I even started to see it coming, but it didn’t change anything. The allure was so damn powerful because it gave me something I had been chasing my entire life.

Pure, powerful, passionate bliss. The kind of shit that sends tingles through every nerve in your body. The kind of shit that makes your heart race faster than you thought possible, that makes all the anger and doubt and worries melt away just under their touch. It lights you up like a furnace and makes you scream forward like a muscle car. But it never lasts. It can’t last, because it’s fuel is you. All the little bits of you. Your quirks, your idiosyncrasies, your habits, your opinions, your creativity, your very essence. It eats it all up and burns it away, all fuel for the passion. You end up trying to do anything and everything just to keep it going another day, another hour, another minute, until it finally sputters out.

And then it’s gone. And you realize there’s nothing left. And while they’re still there, the love is nowhere to be seen, and they become a reminder of what you don’t have. It hurts, and all too often that hurt gets shared. You start finding things that don’t fit, the parts of each other that scrape like there was a miscalculation at the factory. The scraping just goes and goes, and without that fire going it digs into your brain until you can’t take it anymore, and you snap at them.

Or maybe they snap at you. It’s a game of whoever has the least patience, but it's inevitable either way. It’s not much. Just a hurtful comment at the wrong moment. But the foundation was empty, and so it crumbles into dust before your eyes. And then you’re alone. Alone and in pain. Maybe you run from it, moving away to somewhere new, somewhere better. Maybe you hide from it, distracting yourself with vices both legal and maybe illegal.

Me? I always wallowed in it. Sitting in the sadness and pain, feeling every detail of it coursing through my veins. Committing them to memory so I could replay them in my head on a loop. But it didn’t stop there, either. My mind would turn on me, like an emotional autoimmune disease. Regret and blame and hatred all turning to me and telling me I was the problem. That I was cursed. That I couldn’t love people. At my lowest, that’s when my mind would come to torture me. A few times it almost felt like an execution.

Listening to Pine Barrens reminds me of those times. It reminds me of the things my mind used to tell me at my lowest moments. It reminds me of being so hopelessly and dangerously in love that it would ruin my entire life. It reminds me of burning myself out for that other person and being tossed aside in return. It reminds me that passionate love is often the most destructive.

However, while I’m bombarded by these memories, I’m granted something important to protect myself against them. An outside perspective. Listening to Pine Barrens lets me view these moments outside of myself, seeing the moment as it is instead of how I felt. I see the pain, I see the futile attempts at bliss, I see the self-sacrifice tearing me apart. I see it all, but it’s not happening to me, not really. It’s happening to a me I used to be, a kid who was misguided but was still trying her best.

It was so easy to be there and flog myself at the altar of the person I Should Have Been and Could Have Been. To scream and yell and hurt myself in the path of a wish that was never granted. To condemn my soul early and cast myself into a hell of my own making. Now, I stand here and see the past and I realize.

I have no interest in following false idols. The person I should have been never existed. She was never going to exist. Should Have Been and Could Have Been were just the excuses, just the blinds over the view of what Was. Seeing what Was, I can’t help but feel empathy. When the false comparisons melt away, the hatred melts with them.

I’ve made mistakes. I’ve hurt people, and been hurt back. I’ve indulged in dangerous love and left myself scarred. I don’t have to hate myself for that. There wouldn’t be a point to, anyways. I’m not who I should have been, but I’m something a lot more real.

I’m a person who is trying to be better.