Dear Lukas,

I am narcissistic. I am self-centered and selfish. All of it is true, and I'm ashamed to admit it. I'm sorry to have taken it all out on you. I didn't even know I was for a while. Then you broke up with me, and it all came together.

Do you remember when we broke up?

I was on the bridge that day, like many others. Dangling from the edge, I was taunting death. I'd come so close by choice, I was starting to think he couldn't get me. I got brave, reaching out further than I ever had before. I was ready to let go completely and see if I stayed up. Then you showed up.

Rage filled me in ways I can't describe. Seeing you there, with the pain in your eyes, it snapped something inside of me. At that moment, I thought it was because I secretly hated you. I thought I secretly resented you, despite the fact that I was supposed to love and cherish you. Now I know that I was angry that someone cared.

I screamed. I let it all out. I called you every horrible name I know. I told you things no one else knows. I blamed everything in my life on you. You were my boyfriend, after all. If there were to be issues, so many could be traced to you. But none of them were actually your fault.

You stood brave in the face of my wrath. You watched with crying eyes as I let everything inside of me out. It just made me angrier to see you cry. To see you in pain as well. I demanded an answer from you, hoping you could diffuse the situation like usual. Find a way to calm me down.

But I was too much that time.

I watched the fight leave your eyes. Your will to help me. It disappeared as you finally gave in to everything I said. Finally took everything to heart. You hung your head, remained silent for a moment, and then left.

I never thought you'd believe the things I said. If I did, I would have never said them. I would've kept everything locked deep inside and just suffered it out. Maybe got a therapist. But if I knew what I would do to you, I never would've treated you that way.

Watching you leave made me angry. Angrier than I'd ever been. Just like my mother, you'd left. Just like my father, you'd given up caring. Just like everyone else in my life, you no longer thought I was worth it.

I got off the bridge that day and stormed home. I slammed my door on the way in and screamed. A primal scream to let go of everything I had. To let go of all the anger I had for what I had done. Then I was left with emptiness.

I didn't leave my bed for three days after you left. I couldn't. There was no point. I'd lost the only person left who cared. I'd lost the one person who gave me meaning. The one person I could depend on.

Eventually, I got enough energy to finally move. I rose from my bed with dark eyes and an empty chest. Everything hurt. I was sore all over. Everything in me screamed to fall back onto my bed. To finally give into the unbearable pain. But I couldn't.

I thought of you as I stood at the forked path. To live or to die. To fight for life or to give in to death. You stood at the pass, and I didn't know which way you would guide me. For so long, you'd guided me towards death. The loss of you made me want nothing more. But you pointed towards life this time.

I had to live on to become a better person. For you.

My first step was to find out what was wrong with me. And through funding by nonprofit organizations, I managed to finally get connections to a psychiatrist. They did all their strange tests on me, and decided that I had schizophrenia.

The diagnosis alone changed me. Suddenly it all made sense. The voices in my head that I thought were just me. Random bursts of anger based on things that didn't make sense. An occasional vision of you, where you degraded me in the ways I would always yell at you.

They put me with a therapist, paid for by various organizations. Immediately, I was put to work on fixing my mental state. Techniques were being handed to me left and right, too many to count. It was overwhelming. It wasn't helping.

But eventually, it did start to help. I started to take each strategy one at a time. Slowly, it started to get better. The voices got quieter. The hallucinations were less frequent. I was getting happier.

Then I started to make friends. One day I was sitting by myself, and the next, I had a group of people around me. We bonded immediately over our pasts, and suddenly I was no longer alone. I had support.

But despite all the support, something felt like it was missing. I didn't feel quite whole. The controlled schizophrenia and improved life weren't enough. I needed something more. Something I'd lost.

I needed you.

I talked to all my new friends about you. Told them how horribly I treated you. How I caused you pain and misery when all you wanted to do was help. I asked them how I could fix everything. How I could make you love me again.

Some laughed in my face. They told me that I could never reconcile after what I'd done. Others said I might be able to be friends with you, but you'd never trust me again to be anything more.

One person, however, told me I'd need to repent. I'd need to tell you everything I'd done wrong and admit everything I'd done to hurt you. I needed to give you the world as an apology gift, and then have something better to prove I could be good to you again.

At first, I had no clue how to approach that advice. How could I possibly apologize to you in such a grandiose way? There was nothing I could think of that could possibly make up for what I'd done.

Then I got your letter.

I knew time was of the essence. I'd hurt you so bad, I knew without a doubt you were going to jump. So I wrote you this letter, pouring every fault of mine into the words. Writing with ink made of my sorrows and regrets.

I hope that within this letter you can hear the sincerity of which I've written this apology. The true sadness that grips my heart every time I think of what I did to you. I've gotten better, Lukas, but it's not because you made life bad. It's because I realized that a life without you wasn't worth living. I got better so I could be with you.

I need to be with you, Lukas. More than anything I've ever needed before.

The boy who destroyed your self-worth,

Mitchell Donn.