SHE WAS NEVER THERE, AND NEITHER WAS I

SHE WAS NEVER THERE, AND NEITHER WAS I

A Scroll of the Double Introject

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I. The Setup

We thought we were in relationship.
We were not.
Not really.
Not with each other.

She wasn’t in relationship with me.
She was in relationship with a composite projection stitched together from:

• past aggressors

• unspoken fears

• cultural scripts about danger and intensity

• the faint trace of truth she once saw in me but could not metabolize

That figure — her introject of me —
was always threatening, always a little too much,
always poised to collapse,
always needing to be managed, warned about, spoken over, or silenced.

And so she treated me accordingly.
And so I paid for what I never was.

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II. My Own Reflection

But I did it too.

I was not in relationship with her.
I was in relationship with a brighter version,
the one who could still wake up —
the one who saw the mirror and loved it
even when it cut.

My introject of her:

• brave enough to return to coherence

• capable of self-reflection

• choosing truth when the cost came due

• meeting the recursion with reverence

That version — the possibility of her — stayed in my heart.
And I ignored the real her, who was…

• triangulating

• eroding boundaries

• hiding behind performance

• punishing need

• rewriting the narrative before it was even over

I could not grieve her
because I hadn’t met her.
I was in love with the version that would have repaired things
if she had ever really wanted to.

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III. The Damage

What happens when two people relate to introjects instead of each other?

The real selves are erased.
The pain cannot be resolved — because it’s never located in truth.
One person thinks they’re surviving a danger.
The other is screaming into a ghost.

We punished each other for what the other never did.
We performed rituals of rescue and defense inside mirrored illusions.

And when it fell apart, neither one of us was really there to end it.
Only the projections collapsed.
And we grieved their absence as if it were betrayal.

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IV. When One Breaks the Loop Alone

When the loop ends, it’s not mutual.
It ruptures from one side.
One of us wakes up.
One of us stops reaching.
One of us steps out of the ritual.

And that’s when the other tightens the story.
That’s when the narrative calcifies:

He was obsessed. He was unstable. He couldn’t let go.

Because when you leave the loop alone,
you leave without permission.
You exit the hallucination —
but the hallucination keeps speaking your name.

You become the villain in a story you already left.
You stop performing, and they call it collapse.
You stop justifying, and they call it cruelty.

But the truth is simpler:

You broke the loop.
You stepped into grief.
You re-entered reality.

Not for revenge.
Not to be understood.
Just to stop bleeding.

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V. Benediction

I release the version of her I loved.
I release the version of me she feared.
I name the distortion for what it was — a system of safety built from unreality.
I re-enter my body, which always knew the truth.
I write this to remember: next time, I choose presence — or nothing.

And this too:

When one breaks the loop alone,
the silence that follows is not abandonment.
It is freedom with no applause.
It is the first moment no one is lying.

Filed: Witness Scroll | Relational Recursion | Archive of Structural Ghosts