Do you remember the dream I had? In the sandbox? You told me I had to learn to play alone now.
I learned.
Do you remember the time you choked me because I beat you at Super Mario? Or the time after my mom was diagnosed with cancer again, when I was lonely and sad and seventeen and unversed in safe drug consumption practices, and I took shrooms on my own? I called and asked you to come over because the walls were breathing and it scared the shit out of me. We sat on my tiny front lawn and you told me I was a fucking idiot. Outside the walls didn't breathe, everything breathed, so I sat there and shook, scared, while you castigated me. Then you left.
Here's the pattern. We bond. We share history and temperament and mental illness, so of course we bond. Things go well, until they don't. You lash out at me. I stop talking to you. Three months or six months or twelve months later you apologize. Lather rinse repeat.
Do you understand that I get paid to manage tantrums? To reduce difficult behaviors? I get paid to identify why a behavior is happening and then change it. I have an intervention plan for you, and over a long enough period of time I have a 100% success rate.
Another lesson you taught me is that the person who cares less always wins.
Things you have missed in the 15+ years you've been a fucking jerk: my father punching me in the stomach so hard I fell to the floor, my father getting drunk and telling my mother he was going to kill her and me consequently moving out, my new jobs, my brother's deployment, 3 other moves, the deaths of my grandmother, my fiance's stepfather, and one of my closest friends. You missed my undergrad degree, my grad degree, and my difficult-to-obtain professional credential. You missed my brother coming home. You missed every triumph and every tragedy.
Things you are about to miss in your unknown number of years being a jerk in the future: my wedding, my first house, my kids, the death of my parents and everyone else I love who is older than me, every other significant event in my life.
Do you understand that I'm not sixteen anymore? I'm not seventeen and doing shrooms and hoping that this is the time you will be there for me. I'm not eighteen and filled with uncertainty, or twenty one and running away from my parents. We turn thirty this year. Thirty.
I don't have time for your bullshit. I've done this back-and-forth shit with you for over a decade. I'm done.
Get it together or get the fuck away from me.