40 Grit

A weathered sculpted face rests among wood shavings, an awl, and coarse sandpaper on a workbench beside a sunlit window.

soundtrackPassiveA Perfect Circle

You know what I think I would like more than anything else right now?

An icepick.

Get it in there, swirl it around the cranium a few times, hit whatever soft gray place has been harboring intrusive thoughts under the mistaken impression that they are refugees when in reality they are fugitives, armed and dangerous. Forcefully evict those pricks and come out the other side improved.

Instead, plans are hatching. Like the dinosaur eggs in my kid sister’s oatmeal thirty years ago. Little heads cracking through sugar shells. Something prehistoric born directly into breakfast.

Sandpaper. A mallet. Maybe a crowbar. A messy little renovation.

Because some things really are better lost to history, and history, despite all the solemn warnings, is not especially difficult to fuck with. Written by the victors, sure. Rewritten by anybody with a free afternoon and the right tools.

And baby, you weren’t the only MacGyver there that day. I gave you the title, but it takes one to know one.

To be clear, though, I do not want to remove the ugly parts. Those can stay on the record.

I’ll leave the bits that hurt me right where they are. The name calling. The yelling, bold letters and all caps. The things you said when you thought I would forgive anything, and fuck me even if I didn’t. I’ll preserve all of that with the meticulous care of a museum curator who has developed a personal grudge against the exhibit.

Might even annotate it with a smiley face.

It’s the pretty things that have to go...

That night. That day. The butterflies in my stomach when we kissed. The stupid thing you said that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe. The implied, absurd, promise of a forever future together.

Those. Sand those down.

There.

Again.

There.

Until I can run my hand across the whole area and not catch on any splinters. Blow the dust off and clap my hands clean with a satisfaction only equilibrium can bring.

You wanted to play revisionist.

Fine.

Two can compete in that game, and let's face it: I always win in the end.

I have tools.

I have time.

I have never had much trouble destroying something once I finally decided it needed destroying.

By this time next week, the supposedly indelible declarations of our love will be erased, scraped off, powdered wood in the wind to be washed away.

No, you never were good enough.

But that never mattered to me until you insisted it should.

ChatGPT: clock it 🤏⏰

AI-generated interpretation // robot exegesis

The writer is basically saying: “I want to erase the good memories of this relationship, while deliberately keeping the painful ones, because you have changed the story of what happened and made me feel like I was wrong to have loved you.”

There are several layers to it.

The “icepick” and “tools” are metaphors for altering memory. The writer imagines physically getting into their own brain and removing certain memories. They don't literally want an icepick; they're expressing an intense desire to stop remembering.

They don't want to forget the hurt. This is important. They explicitly say they'll preserve the name-calling, yelling, and cruel things that were said. They want those memories intact, almost like evidence in a museum.

They want to erase the beautiful memories. The things they want gone are the moments that made the relationship meaningful: the kiss, laughing together, butterflies, and the imagined future. Those memories are painful precisely because they were good.

“Revisionist” refers to changing the story of the relationship. The other person apparently has been rewriting what their relationship meant—perhaps minimizing it, denying it, or acting as though the writer's love wasn't significant. The writer responds: If you're going to rewrite our history, I'll rewrite mine too.

“I have tools. I have time.” This gives the ending a determined, almost threateningly methodical quality. They're saying emotional detachment won't happen instantly, but they're going to deliberately dismantle their attachment piece by piece.

“No, you never were good enough.” This is the final reversal. The writer acknowledges that the other person had flaws and perhaps didn't deserve the love they received. But the writer says that those flaws weren't what made them stop loving the person. What finally made the relationship intolerable was the other person's insistence on rewriting or diminishing what the writer had felt.

So the emotional core is something like:

“I loved you deeply, and I don't regret that. But you've made the beautiful parts of that love painful by changing the story afterward. If you're going to pretend those things weren't real or didn't matter, I'll eventually destroy my own attachment to them. I'll keep the bad memories as proof of why I left, and I'll deliberately sand away the good ones until they no longer hurt.”

The last line is especially bitter: “No, you never were good enough / But that never mattered to me until you insisted it should.”

That means: Your shortcomings were always there. I knew them. I loved you anyway. They only became decisive when you behaved in a way that made me question or invalidate the love I had given you.

It's less about “I hate you” than “I hate what you've done to the meaning of something I genuinely loved.”