Maybe it was infidelity.

Maybe you lied, you were deceitful, and you betrayed someone you cared about.

Or maybe you just shattered one promise after another, leaving a trail of broken vows in your wake.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, this is our story.

You caused heartache, heartbreak, and unrelenting pain. We were in a place where we were once comfortable, warm inside our protected and secure shell—could you ever have foreseen the damage you would cause? This is now our own private hell.

This is not the story we wanted, but it’s the one you left us with. Not the ending we imagined, but your finale was a spectacular tidal wave of carnage.

There was a beautiful beginning, a middle filled with dizzying highs and brutal lows. Then a catastrophic ending where we are left to heal our wounds, mend our broken bits, and learn to love our scars. The scars that you slowly and painfully cut into us with each lie, each betrayal, and each fragmented promise.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, this is our aftermath.

The aftermath of you is a desolate place. It’s a place of splintered dreams, a fractured future, deceptive words, messy memories, uncomfortable unknowings, and brutal knowings. It’s a place where we search for our dignity, rebuild our self-respect, piece together our self-esteem, grapple with our grief, and nurse our shattered, bloodied, and traumatised hearts. That same heart you lovingly embraced in the beginning was the one you so harshly ripped out and trampled on in the end.

The f*cking aftermath is like a treacherous winding road. It’s frightening and half the time you have no idea what is in front of you. The cliffs are steep and some days you stumble so close to the edge, so close, and you wonder how you survived. You wonder if you want to survive.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, you pushed us off the cliff of trust, the cliff of faith, the cliff of belief in ourselves, and we now have to learn how to get back to the top.

Unravelling you and the us that was left behind is a labyrinth. Complicated, irregular, and completely f*cking confusing, with so many roads to choose but none of them leading to the answers. We keep running and searching; we keep hoping that the end is in sight, that we will finally exit this hell. We will finally see the light. Because we are exhausted, we are parched, we are damn near destroyed.

But we are f*cking resilient. We had to be. We are courageous because we don’t hide behind lies, behind masks, behind the fake façade.

We will put ourselves back together one breath, one tear, one breakdown, and one ounce of self-love at a time. It will be painstaking, it will be slow, it will be gut wrenching, and it will be the hardest damn thing we will do—but we will do it. Despite you, maybe because of you, those lessons that nearly killed us will be what brings us home to ourselves.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, you know that lies will lock you up and the truth will be the only key.

You will have to reconcile what you have done. You have a choice to tuck it away inside of you and wait for the impending explosion, because you know, oh yes, you know, at some point all that has been hidden will explode, and when it does, there will be casualties; there are always casualties. It’s better to tell the truth and hurt us than it is to lie and save our face. But it would have been better to not betray us in the first place.

Somewhere on your life path, you got lost. Your integrity went missing. Your strength of character vanished. Speaking your truth didn’t matter. Courage slipped away. You saw vulnerability as weakness. Honesty was mislaid. Your authenticity was misplaced. And your gaping wounds grew bigger and bigger, until we became collateral damage.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, we know your wounds are deep, your needs are many, but each lie you tell, each betrayal you do, and every promise you break cuts you deeper and wounds you more.

We may love you. We may miss you. We may even want and desire you, but you are kryptonite to us. Your lies, betrayals, disloyalty, they seep into our veins and slowly poison us, until all we have left are little pieces of who we used to be. It’s rare that you can fix that because the foundation upon which we were built is in utter disrepair. We cannot build something strong, something real, and something stable on your bricks of lies, those same lies that continue to taste so sweet to you. Those same lies that will be your eventual undoing.

So we love ourselves. We want and desire our own happiness. We fertilise our soul with self-belief, self-trust, forgiveness, gratitude, and compassion. As we heal and grow, our wings begin to form, and with grace and care we jump off that cliff, because now we have our own wings to set ourselves free. Now we can fly out of your cage of painful deceit.

Dear Betrayer of Trust, you may have lied to us, betrayed us, and broken promises and our heart, but when the darkness descends, if you’ve not faced your truth and worked on those wounds, it will be those same lies, betrayals, and shattered promises that will define who you are. Forever chained to the lie your life has become. And that’s an incredibly sad ending to your own story. But it’s your story alone.

We have learnt that sometimes the person you’d take a bullet for is the one standing behind the trigger.

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