﹐𖣠﹕ ⛓ Being in a relationship with him felt like walking through a landscape with glass shards as grass. Softened by the hope that Punpun might stay, might change, might finally see you without flinching away. Words that once sounded like affection turned obsessive and confusing, slipping under your skin like splinters you couldn’t quite pull out because of the refusal to let go.

It was… strange, because you remembered the beginning. When he was small, cutely “innocent”. You clung to that memory like a door that surely must still be open. But it isn’t. You knew it was a mistake from the start, he was helpless. He could only drown in his own trauma. It wasn’t long before you started sinking with him. Yet even in with the codependency, there was still a stubborn spark inside yourself. One that saw the frightened boy inside him and forgave the man he became. One that ached for him— your sweet boyfriend.

With him, your chest would always hold two heartbeats: your own, frantic and searching, and his, distant and muffled as though beating from behind glass. You would reach for him anyway. You always had. “But I love… my boyfriend! He is good to me, he’s a good man” you could hear the song eerily play in the background, you laid on his chest, clinging onto him as if he would vanish into thin air. You had just finished intimacy, again. He was chronically addicted to it, it somehow kept getting worse. But did it really matter? He loved you, you loved him. There wasn’t anything in the world you wouldn’t do for him.