u/EmoPath

I know I shouldn't do it

I know that it's not fair

To me, to y- how many of you are there?

I've seen so many profiles

I tried so many dares

I need to get me through it

And you don't want me there

Friendship will not do it

That, I cannot bear

I said I'd see you through it

So why don't we start there?

Is there accountability?

Would everything you share

Be the feigning performance of a lifetime?

Or genuine relief of our despair?

I want to think that's true

But things I have to say to you

Won't be given freely

If no ownership is due

With that I will invite you

To where I walk the most

Two point six miles Friday

After work, we'll see what goes

I know I shouldn't do it

I know that it's not fair

To me, to y- how many of you are there?

I've seen so many profiles

I tried so many dares

I need to get me through it

And you don't want me there

Friendship will not do it

That, I cannot bear

I said I'd see you through it

So why don't we start there?

Is there accountability?

Would everything you share

Be the feigning performance of a lifetime?

Or genuine relief of our despair?

I want to think that's true

But things I have to say to you

Won't be given freely

If no ownership is due

With that I will invite you

To where I walk the most

Two point six miles Friday

After work, we'll see what goes

I know I shouldn't do it

I know that it's not fair

To me, to y- how many of you are there?

I've seen so many profiles

I tried so many dares

I need to get me through it

And you don't want me there

Friendship will not do it

That, I cannot bear

I said I'd see you through it

So why don't we start there?

Is there accountability?

Would everything you share

Be the feigning performance of a lifetime?

Or genuine relief of our despair?

I want to think that's true

But things I have to say to you

Won't be given freely

If no ownership is due

With that I will invite you

To where I walk the most

Two point six miles Friday

After work, we'll see what goes

Admit it, your ego ended us

Shoed me out, a speck of dust

Longing for that one last touch

We hugged it out, it meant so much

 

I weep for days

Attempt to fade

My heart, my soul, my longing

 

Could you not see

You meant to me

Everything. My Love. Belonging.

 

I wasn’t with another guy

I’m flattered that you think I’d try

My Try, 🎶to keep you off my mind🎶

Was just another night

Of drinks and pool and nibling

 

And now, I have to wonder why

You said those things to me and lie

I called it out in real-time

All the tactics: deny, deny, deny

 

I see you say you say you cry

I hear you say I said goodbye

Is it even fair for you to wonder why?

When you’re the one that said goodbye

 

Why have I never seen you cry

Belief is hard for me to try

When I poured out and left to dry

You’re the one that said goodbye

 

So much disdain, so disrespectful

You stabbed my soul, you were so resentful

With no “I’m sorry” - Nothing left

But on here your pride is kept

From remorse and true reflection

No accountability - All projection

 

So many lies I saw from you

In disbelief I saw it through

That one day soon you’d tell the truth

Abandoned me instead – you knew

 

My biggest fear was used against me

Wrapped around my heart so gently

Then ripped apart and said forget me

 

This love I knew so well before

From other monsters with pusty sores

Brought back to life in mine in yours

I give up. Defeat. No more.

 

Now you say you want me back

You didn’t think that I’d keep track?

You run to win, but gold you lack

My heart is metal, yours is black

 

You won the fight but now you lose

All the right to me, abuse

Do you understand the words I chose?

I hope you see it; I hope you do

 

Now listen please, to Socrates

And just know that I can be forgiving

You must go deep inside and see

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

 

The journey’s long, maybe five years in fact

But Sauron called, he wants his ring back

I fully fell in love with all three of them.

I was doing so much better this week, but remembering saying goodbye to them while he was sleeping was so hard.

I had a flashback making a snack at work.

I used to amp them all up to give them whipped cream and I felt a rush of joy.

Then complete loss of emotional control.

😭😭😭

Music has a strange way of holding a mirror up to our healing. After a heartbreak, falling back in love with old songs can feel like a reclamation project. The lyrics stay the same, but the meaning warps and reshapes itself to fit the depth of what we’ve survived.

For a long time, I identified with Florence and the Machine’s "Bird Song" from a place of internalized guilt. I used to think the song was about my own secrets, my own shame. I felt like the narrator—someone bound to "tell on myself" one way or another, heavy with things I couldn't keep hidden.

But after identifying, confronting, and leaving a textbook covert narcissistic abuser, that song resonates with a chilling, profound new meaning. I don’t hear it from my perspective anymore.

I hear it from his.

In our final months together, I devoured more than ten books on narcissism, childhood trauma, and toxic relationship dynamics. I was quietly arming myself with the vocabulary of my own reality.

During our last fight, the education paid off. I didn't play my usual part in the script. Instead, I stood my ground and identified, predicted, and called out his manipulative behaviors in real-time. I gave voice to the hidden mechanics of the relationship.

I looked him in the eye and told him I knew exactly what would happen next: that once we were done, he would launch a smear campaign and accuse me of doing every single thing he had actually done to me.

That level of exposure causes a deep, intolerable narcissistic injury. When a covert manipulator realizes their mask is entirely transparent, the illusion is ruined. The supply has to end.

But what followed was the most terrifying part.

Once the confrontation was over, I stopped engaging. As I packed up my things to leave, I transitioned from a participant into a silent observer. And that's when the shift happened.

The frantic "hoovering" phase began, and it was deeply unsettling to witness. I watched him completely morph back into the soft-spoken, deeply caring, nice man I thought I had met at the beginning. If I hadn’t read the books, I might have fallen for it. Instead, I felt entirely creeped out.

Because I was just watching, I could see how every single behavior was designed to pull me back in. He was constantly telling on himself, letting the desperation slide through the cracks of his kindness.

Even during our final, seemingly "reflective" conversations about our relationship—while he was actively promising me he would never talk down about me—I could hear the framework of the smear campaign being built. The lies were already woven into his standard rewrite of history.

"The Song Was Coming From My Mouth"

This is where the metaphor of "Bird Song" flips so brilliantly. In the song, the narrator desperately tries to bury the truth, only to find that “the song was coming from my mouth.”

When you cause an injury that intense to a manipulator's ego, they cannot accept the loss. They know, on some level, that their behavior is wrong, but they are entirely incapable of taking accountability. Their ego demands that they get back at you. They have to drive the narrative.

By refusing to fight him anymore—by just packing my bags and silently observing—I left him alone with his own reflection. And because they cannot stop, their coping mechanisms take over automatically.

The frantic hoovering, the discard, the desperate smear campaign—these weren't just reactions. They were the song coming out of his own mouth. By executing the exact, highly predictable patterns I had just called him out on, he will become and has already became his own whistleblower. He cannot help but tell on himself.

And because of this, I know I can handle myself when a bird flies by and tells me what I have done. But they will not build a nest, they may sing, but I'm not afraid, and I will not be inviting.

Bird Song - Florence and the Machine

Well I didn't tell anyone, but a bird flew by

Saw what I'd done he set up a nest outside,

And he sang about what I'd become

He sang so loud, sang so clear

I was afraid all the neighbours would hear,

So I invited him in, just to reason with him

I promised I wouldn't do it again

But he sang louder and louder inside the house,

And no I couldn't get him out

So I trapped him under a cardboard box

Stood on it to make him stop

I picked up the bird and above the din I said

That's the last song you'll ever sing

Held him down, broke his neck,

Taught him a lesson he wouldn't forget

But in my dreams began to creep

That old familiar tweet tweet tweet

I opened my mouth to scream and shout,

I waved my arms and flapped about

But I couldn't scream and I couldn't shout,

Couldn't scream and I couldn't shout

I opened my mouth to scream and shout

Waved my arms and flapped about

But I couldn't scream I couldn't shout,

The song was coming from my mouth

(16x) From my mouth

While listening to Florence and the Machine, "Big God," I was inspired turn my journalling into a letter I will never send. This was a personal healing method I chose to create this letter explaining my perspective to my ex the course of our one year and two week relationship. Please note, this is my first post on reddit.

This letter is for my favorite ghost.

Phase 1:

Phool Me Once

(Limerence and Mirroring)

In standard relationship development, this is the "Honeymoon Phase." Clinically, it is driven by limerence—an acute state of cognitive obsession and emotional dependency. For an anxious-avoidant pairing, this phase feels like a definitive cure to past trauma, making the inevitable fall much more devastating.

Me (38m):

In the beginning, the first six months, my attachment system was highly activated but satiated. My natural hypervigilance was functioning, but I was registering all the positive cues. I meticulously noted your micro-expressions. When I walked into the bar, I noticed you looking down at your phone to compare me to my profile pictures, and you smiled so disarmingly. You watched me like a hawk at our first lunch date. I felt safe; my insecurities were neutralized around you. This led me to rapid emotional investment.

You (35m):

Whether conscious or subconscious, you engaged in mirroring with an atomic love bomb. You presented yourself as highly secure and deeply invested because, for you, true emotional intimacy wasn’t actualized yet. You were physically affectionate, constantly present, and created a flawless facade of the man I had been waiting for.

Phase 2:

The Shift

(Devaluation and Nervous System Dysregulation)

The transition wasn't an explosion; it was an erosion. The silence crept in first. We would have the better part of a week together, but the days of your sudden indifference to any shared activity began to feel like active punishment.

The psychological toll manifested physically as my nervous system was forced onto high alert. If I shared a genuine concern—like feeling defeated after setting a boundary to protect my interest in film and art because you relentlessly made them the punchline of your jokes—the passive aggression escalated. I found myself having to articulate basic boundaries for physical safety, rest, and respect. I had to ask you not to intentionally jump out and scare me right before bed. I had to ask you to stop scratching my foot when I was trying to sleep, an invasive touch that lightly tickled, disrupting my rest.

For the majority of our relationship, your sudden looks of disappointment, disapproval, or anger entirely mismatched the tone of what had been a great day. These expressions were quickly brushed off as jokes, but they were strategically deployed to throw me off balance. Predictably, they occurred during the exact moments I was happiest or feeling productive. Whenever I felt vulnerable enough to ask for respect or assert a boundary, you manufactured an environment of withdrawal that would worsen to deeper manipulations in our last months together. I was constantly being placed in the dog house simply for asking for baseline emotional safety.

Phase 3:

Compartmentalization

(The Erasure of Collaboration)

The cognitive dissonance peaked as your covert devaluation became public. The "other man" was your best friend—the same friend whose parents you wanted me to meet. Yet, in front of those very parents, you conveniently "forgot" our anniversary. To others, you casually mentioned we met on Scruff, stripping the relationship of its actual foundation.

Even more damaging was your compartmentalization of my life. Leaving my mother's home, where I was actively supporting her by helping care for my nieces and nephew, was a massive emotional and logistical sacrifice. Moving in with you was a milestone I took seriously. You, however, kept my move-in a secret from the people in your life. Even after more than six months of a ‘monogamous’ relationship and cohabitation, you continued to minimize us by simply telling people we were just "dating." I was being managed down and erased from my own reality.

This erasure extended to the smallest details of our shared life, twisting moments of potential connection into arenas for control. When I simply asked what inspired you to make shallot oil and plan a Thanksgiving recipe around it, you snapped at me. A holiday dinner we had planned to create together was entirely hijacked. You took over the kitchen, leaving me so excluded that I had to silently bake and prepare my own separate recipes before you even began cooking. The collaboration I craved was replaced by a rigid dictation of terms.

Phase 4:

The Phantom

(The Discard and The Departure)

The end was not a mutual parting of ways; it was a psychological severing. I did not plan on coming back that next morning. I was actually afraid to see you again, but I needed my laptop.

As I packed my little box, the light shining in from outside was intensely bright. It illuminated the room so completely that I could clearly see the color of your eyes. But what I saw was terrifying. Despite the direct sunlight, your pupils were massively dilated, swallowing the color. It was a dead, hollow look. You looked like a shark hunting for prey, as if you were quietly enjoying the torment of my departure.

Yet, simultaneously, you softened your voice. You asked me multiple times if I needed help with my box. You came in for a little hug. The man with the dead eyes was wearing the voice of the man from our first lunch date.

I put my things down and gave you a real hug. I selfishly took the saddest farewell of my life. I knew I needed it more than the damaging behaviors it would invite in the future. I was terrified of the empty void I had just witnessed in your eyes, but I had been mourning the ghost of the man I thought you were for six months. I needed a real goodbye.

I will always love that ghost. Unfortunately, that ghost was never you.

I did not fail this relationship; I outgrew its pathology. Your inability to engage in repair, your constant need to be the victim, and your weaponization of my vulnerabilities are deeply entrenched behavioral deficits.

My extensive self-reflection and psychological knowledge ultimately saved me from further dehumanization.

I am mourning a fantasy.

A facade.

A ghost.