There is someone I hate more than I am comfortable admitting

Dear Delyara, I wish I were writing something prettier than that. It is not the hot dramatic hate people expect. It is colder. Older. It has been living quietly in me for years. This person hurt me in a way that changed the shape of my life. Not only in the obvious external sense. In how I learned to move through rooms afterwards. In how my body flinches at certain tones. In how quickly I distrust kindness when power is involved. In the years of self-doubt that followed because the damage was subtle enough that I kept trying to minimise it in order to survive. I have done the respectable things. I have tried to understand context. I have said the mature sentences. I have told myself hate only poisons the person holding it. Still, the hate remains. And some days I think the real poison was not the feeling. It was the pressure to sanitise it before it had even been properly heard inside me. I am not proud of this hatred. I am simply done pretending it isn’t there.