One Time

One time — just one time — I’m taking the step I’ve always been too scared to take: stepping onto a bus with no destination. It won’t erase the hurt, the pain, or the abandonment I feel. But maybe, for the first time, I’ll be able to breathe something different. Maybe I’ll find the simple distraction I need to stop staring at the wreckage of my life.

It takes a desperate person to look at their entire life and say, I’ve never been worth it. Even then, you still want to cling to what you know. But leaving this time means it all has to go. I can’t carry it with me. Relationships, friendships, family — now they’re just reminders of pain and disappointment.

I can’t keep pretending in this city of pretending that I’m not dying while nobody cares. It takes everything to say: I am closing myself off for my own well-being from the past 44 years and all who’ve been in it. They’ve become ghosts and jailers of my disappointments — people who arrive only out of need or convenience, but never for the want of me.

This is my recognition. This is my selfish act. For the first time, I’m ensuring that the value I place on myself will not be diminished again. I will never again let another person near me for love, want, or need. It’s simply too expensive. It’s not that I don’t want connection — it’s that I’ve always been devalued inside of it.

I’ve learned the gods’ lesson: don’t let anyone close, because they will take you for granted and be angry when you ask to be seen as more than a convenience. Humanity has taught me that people will say they’ll arrive for you out of want or need without expectation, but the only person I’ve ever known to actually do that is me — and I’ve been the fool who keeps on giving in the surrender of love.

Family, friends, old love, new love — all of it has been an entrapment, a delusion where you end up screwed. So I’m saving what little life I have left and telling the world: step back. Nothing anyone has done has proven that they ever saw me as worth it. I’d rather ache with loneliness and reject connection than be dragged back into being devalued again.

Humanity has shown me its truth: self-serving, full of ulterior motives, calling me selfish for needing to be shown I have value beyond convenience. Love has cost me everything, while costing everyone else so little. In this cheap world, no one fears the loss of anyone if it costs them nothing.

So no matter what, if I feel a spark of love or connection beyond acquaintance, I will step away and kill it. Because aloneness, even when it hurts, is the only way to secure a future no one can take from me. I just can’t pretend anymore that I’ll ever be happy in a world that has shown me over and over: I was nothing more than a convenience.

It would be crazier for me to keep believing that humans will ever change, or that they’ll see value in anything beyond themselves. So this time, I’m doing what everyone else does — I’m stepping back. I’m accepting that the pain of being alone, the absence of love, is still a better place than being convenient, drained, and devalued. My love and devotion have been poured out with no return, given to people who don’t even understand what those words mean or how to live them without self-indulgence. That ends now.

So I’m sorry. I have lost faith in humans completely, and it would be the definition of crazy for me to continue believing otherwise when the evidence of 44 years — the data of my life — shows me clearly that will never change. I’m tired of being devalued and never being worth a promise kept. I cannot afford anyone coming in and exiting again, demanding that I arrive for their need only to be discarded when I need more than a transaction — when I need a real investment.

This bank is closed. This amusement park is rundown and abandoned. Others have come and gone so freely, with such disregard, never seeing the value in staying, in lifting, in arriving during the darkness. I must recognize that human connection is a fantasy of self-service that I cannot afford. So in this act, I am saying it is better to be alone in all things. Every connection has left me bruised and broken, with only the demand to pick myself back up for them — never with investment, only with demand on their end.

And let me tell you this: everyone places such high value on self to the exclusion of others — but this world has taught me that self is so cheap it’s not even worth the risk of letting another in. Because deep down, we all know there’s already no value. That’s why nobody puts anything up, and why abandonment is always the way love ends.