You can’t remember when you let it get this far, or how it happened, or what the hell you were thinking. Yet you’re not doing anything about it. You’re here to stay! Comfortable in the web of doom you’ve spun for yourself, you could never argue with her reaping the rewards of your life’s work, never lifting a finger. Why should she? She isn’t close to perfect. She doesn’t try to hide that. In fact, she’s kind of greedy and interested only in manipulating others for her own gain. You wouldn’t have her any other way. That’s the thing, though—you don’t really have her, and it’s quite possible you never will. The length of time you’ve spend pursuing her only to be rejected over and over again? Pathetic. Yet you’ve convinced yourself there’s nobody else out there better for you, but most importantly? Nobody knows you the way she does. She might have rejected your romantic advances but she has never had a problem with using you as an attendant, a confidante. You know all of her life secrets, and in turn? She knows all of yours. Not that she let you ever confide in her without making your cheeks burn. You were roasted upon admission of the most intimate details of your life, laughed at for your most heartfelt confessions. It wasn’t even a secret, all of your closest friends knew how enamored you became with her and how she treated you in turn, wondering how you could spend your whole life chasing after a girl who only ever returned your advances by making you feel like complete shit.

You loved every second of it.

Nobody has ever wanted you, and the closest thing to intimacy you’ve achieved is telling her you love her just for her to hang up on you. That would be your little tradition. You’d say I love you and she’d leave you on read, hang up on you, sometimes even block you. You thought all of that was so painful until one day you said it on text and she replied with a screenshot of her talking to this new guy she’s been into. He was telling her how she’s so pretty, smart, full of life, all of the things she already knows because you tell her all the time, the only difference? She liked it. The same things you would get shunned for he earned her affections for and it drove you crazy. What was the difference between him and you? Where did you fall short where he thrived? You began obsessing over the idea of them together, lurking them online and using your imagination where social media failed you. You created scenarios of them in your mind that became better at getting you hard then all of the boring shit online, you couldn’t feel anything for anybody else. Not a day went by where they didn’t cross your mind, and you couldn’t do anything about it, as if it wasn’t a choice of your own to make, as if you couldn’t turn off your obsession with them like a light switch.

So your secret little habit you had of sending her money, just so that she wouldn’t forget about you when she inevitably found someone like him? It turned into sending to the both of them. In some weird way you felt like you had to compensate for how much time you spent thinking about them, and it’s not like he questioned the random envelopes of cash that mysteriously showed up at his apartment. It was your way of seeing the imprint you had on their lives—a new car, house, vacations anywhere they wanted—a tangible reminder that at one point you had been a part of her life, however insignificant your place was. They don’t need you to thrive, they have their own money to live beautiful lives, and yet you still can’t stop yourself from sending until you have nothing left, having to scrape by to pay rent at your thread-bare apartment. Everything goes to them and even if you have nothing to show for it, it’s all for you.