What Hate Gives

What Hate Gives
What hate gives is emptiness, and I am drained from carrying it. still I wonder, quietly, honestly, if understanding where it comes from is the first step toward finally laying it down.

What hate gives is an abyss I didn’t know I was falling into until the ground never came. It is the hollow silence after all the questions have been asked and none of them answered, the kind of discomfort that doesn’t scream but lingers, heavy and endless. It makes me sit with myself in the dark, uneasy, exposed, realizing that hate hasn’t just distanced me from others, it has carved a void inside me. And in that depth, where even anger grows tired, I am left with a trembling awareness: that holding on to hate feels like losing pieces of myself, slowly, quietly, into a place I do not know how to return from.

What hate gives is memory - sharp and unkind. It whispers that maybe hate is never the beginning, maybe it is what love turns into when it is bruised and left untreated. Maybe we hate because we once cared, because expectation held hands with hope, and betrayal or disappointment came and shattered both. Maybe hate is love that didn’t know where else to go because we handed someone a soft part of us and they returned it chipped, cracked, unrecognizable? Hate is the absence of love. And hate is love that stayed too long in a place with thorns for walls.

— EMMANUEL ANDERSON