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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HeadOfSpectre on 2024-09-18 05:36:18+00:00.

I’d be lying if I said that breaking up with Harmony felt liberating in any sense of the word. It didn’t.

It felt like putting a two week old puppy down with a shotgun behind a woodshed, while looking it straight in its adorable little puppy eyes as it asked you: ‘Why are you doing this to me, Mark?’

But breaking up was the best thing to do for both of us. There’s no easy way to say this, but Harmony needed therapy, not a boyfriend.

Harmony had attachment issues. Dear God, did she have attachment issues… Her mother had died of an overdose when she was a kid, and her Dad had been a deadbeat who’d taken off the first chance he’d gotten, so she’d been punted from foster home to foster home like an unwanted hot potato. As a result, when she latched on to someone, she latched on.

She used to text me constantly, and if I didn’t reply every ten minutes, she’d confront me about it. Sometimes, those little confrontations would escalate into full out arguments… and after a while, ‘sometimes’ became often enough that I stopped bothering with arguing back.

See - you can support someone as much as humanly possible, but there’s only so much one person can do to prop up another’s mental health. No matter how badly I wanted to help her, there was never going to be any way for me to help her work through her literal mountain of personal issues, and my continued failure to do so just poisoned our already toxic relationship even further. And not to sound too salty about everything… but I was pretty sure that on some level, she didn’t want to work through those issues.

What she wanted was someone to just deal with it for her. And so every few nights, she’d sob and ramble about how everyone in her life had abandoned her, how no one ever truly cared about her, how all she wanted was to be loved. But she never really considered what she could be doing to fix her own problems. She never seemed to stop and think about what she could be doing differently. It was everyone else’s fault, never hers and if only someone would come along and be different, if only someone would come along and fix it all for her, everything would be fine.

Some nights, I was that guy.

Some nights I was just another asshole who was inevitably going to abandon her too.

Still, I tried to prove her wrong… God, did I ever try. But she’d already decided that I was going to leave her right after we started dating and while it took three years, that self fulfilling prophecy ultimately came true. I couldn’t deal with her anymore… the constant emotional meltdowns, the constant need for validation, and constant shifts in her mood. One minute, she could be fine, and cuddly and everything would be great. Then I’d say the wrong thing. Mention a TV show or a comic she didn’t like. Spend too much time with a friend who wasn’t her, and then she’d go off on me.

I couldn’t keep doing it. I couldn’t deal with getting yelled at for not spending enough time with her because I was the only one in the house with a regular job, since she refused to go out and get one herself. I couldn’t deal with her anymore.

So I ended it.

At first she cried, bawling her eyes out. Then she got angry, screaming at me, throwing things at me, calling me every single derogatory name in the book. And then, after I’d left to sleep on a friend’s couch, came the apologies. She begged for another chance, she begged for me to come back, she sent me nudes, trying to lure me back with the promise of sex.

Then the cycle started again… until the length between the messages she sent slowly got longer, and longer, and longer as she began to accept the reality that we were finally over. Like I said… I hated doing it to her. It felt like… like drowning my best friend, watching her struggle and fight to save a relationship that I knew had to end.

I realise that to an outsider, she probably does sound legitimately insane. Most people would probably wonder why I even dealt with her for so long… but our relationship wasn’t all bad. We had some good times too. The thing is, with relationships like this, it’s hard to just accept all of the problems. You make excuses.

You downplay them. You focus on the good and every time you get yelled at for being the bad guy, you just take it because even if you know it’s all bullshit on some level, you don’t want to invalidate the other person’s feelings because that’s what all those bad people who left them did, and you don’t want to be one of them! You’re supposed to be different! You need to be different.

You know they’ve got problems but you don’t want to admit it. You don’t want to abandon them like everyone else. You want to be the one who stays with them until the end… in every sense, it’s a hell of your own creation.

In between the arguments and the emotional instability, Harmony could be sweet, she could be sincere, she could be full of passion. She could be a good listener, when I needed to vent. She was genuinely funny! And she loved me… she loved me so much that I knew she felt it in every bone in her body.

She loved me. And I loved her back.

I wanted to help her.

I wanted to help fix her messed up life.

I wanted to be her other half.

I really, truly did,

I just couldn’t… and accepting that was the best thing I could’ve done for either of us.

***

Maybe it was a mistake, but I did stay in touch with Harmony after the breakup. More accurately, she stayed in touch with me and when she finally accepted that she and I were through, then I started responding to her. Mostly, we’d talk about old TV shows we both used to enjoy together, and sometimes she’d give me updates on how she was finally getting her shit together.

I suspect she mostly did that to try and gauge how interested I’d be in getting back together and I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t entertained the thought. I wasn’t planning on actually doing it… not anytime soon, at least. But I had considered it. Maybe if she was getting the help she needed, the therapy, the medication, the socialisation, things would be different.

Maybe.

Either way - it was still nice to see her finally starting to take care of herself. Not only had she started therapy, but she’d also taken up hiking to help her get out of the house. Thanks to the hiking, she’d put on a few pounds of muscle since the breakup. She’d always been scrawny (thanks in no small part to a history of eating disorders), but now she looked good!

If you’d shown me the last selfie she sent to me back when we’d still been dating, I would’ve thought it was someone else entirely! Her skin was less pale than it had been, the dark circles under her eyes had started to fade and her long, messy dark hair looked like it had finally encountered a hairbrush!

In the picture, she was standing at the edge of a cliffside, overlooking a dense forest. She had a wide, beaming smile that I’d never seen on her face before, and the message that accompanied the text read:

“5 KM! New personal best!”

The Harmony I’d known would never have taken a five kilometre hike! Hell, the Harmony I’d known barely changed out of the tank tops and shorts she slept in, but here she was dressed to be out in public! She’d been working full time as a graphic designer! She was doing fantastic!

“Badass!” I’d texted back.

“Thanks! The hike back was actually a little harder, wandered off the trail and got a little lost for a bit there!”

“Oh shit, you okay?”

“Yeah! I’m fine! I’m back in my car!”

Well at least she was safe.

“Gotta say it did spook me a little, though! At one point, I actually think I heard something moving through the trees.”

“Oh shit? You see what it was?”

“I don’t think so? Probably just squirrel or a deer. Didn’t get a good look at it. It probably heard me and ran off.”

At least she seemed upbeat about it… and it really didn’t seem like she’d ever been in any real danger.

“Busy tonight? Wanna grab a bite?”

Her next text didn’t really surprise me. She asked to see me every now and then. I usually turned her down… I wasn’t entirely ready to go back to seeing her in person again. I still needed my space.

“Sorry, I’ve got work.”

“Boo. Another night, then?”

“Yeah, I’ll let you know.”

We’d had that little conversation almost a thousand times before. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I did still have some work I needed to finish up that night, but I knew I wasn’t really going to be that late.

“Yeah! It’s been so long, I really want to see you again! <3”

That message… admittedly almost made me rethink choosing not to see her again. I kept thinking about the good times we’d had together, the best parts of our relationship… and thinking back on those made it easy to forget just how dysfunctional we’d been. Still, my bigger head prevailed and I gave her a polite but dismissive reply, before moving on with my day.

***

She’d messaged me again the next day, late in the morning. Around 10:30. It was a little odd, up until yesterday I hadn’t been hearing from her as much… although I wasn’t that put off by hearing from her again.

That said, the message she’d sent was… concerning.

“Hey! You sleep okay last night?”

She usually didn’t send messages like that. It seemed… oddly personal? At first, I kinda wondered if maybe she was just trying to endear herself to me or something, but that seemed unlike her. She’d never even sent me messages like that when we’d been dating. Still, I responded…

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