Erase Your Past

Loyalty is usually sold as noble. A virtue. A steady hand on the rudder of life. But in relationships, that noble loyalty takes a darker turn when the newcomer enters. Suddenly, loyalty isn’t a gift freely given — it’s a demand, an ultimatum. Prove your devotion not by being present, but by erasing everything that came before. The past isn’t just behind you; it becomes the enemy. This is not loyalty as trust or love. This is loyalty as ransom. “You want me? Burn everything else.” The friends who stood by you for decades. A threat. The family who shaped you? A liability. The institutions that made you whole? Dangerous. Your history, once your anchor, is reclassified as evidence of betrayal. To stay “loyal,” you must file for divorce from your own past. The script is ruthless. Meet an old friend, and you’re accused of disloyalty. Recall a fond memory, and suspicion grows. Show affection for anyone from “before,” and suddenly your loyalty is in question. The newcomer doesn’t just want to join your story—they want to edit it. And the editing is brutal: delete the chapters, erase the footnotes, kill off the supporting cast. Rewrite your life so it looks like the newcomers were the beginning of everything. And this performance is monitored. Every smile, every glance, every stray text is subject to surveillance. Suspicion lurks, the penalty for digression is never spelled out but always felt—fracture, silence, or collapse. Loyalty here is a stage act: you comply out of fear, not out of devotion, ceartainly not love, because you loved the once tou now are compelled to erase. It’s loyalty by subtraction. Not building something new but tearing down what came before. The past must be scrubbed, friendships dissolved, histories silenced, mementos destroyed. The result is not loyalty to a person, but loyalty to a demand—an endless requirement to prove, prove, prove that nothing and no one matters but the newcomer, and is often packaged cunningly as “love.”. And here lies the cruel joke. Erasing past loyalty doesn’t just erase people; it erases you. The friendships, the mentors, the institutions—they are part of who you are. Cut them off, and you amputate yourself. What’s left is a thin, frightened version of yourself, stripped of substance, stripped of self. So, let’s stop pretending. In this darker theater, loyalty is not constancy, not trust, not love. It is control, dressed up in the costume of virtue and love. It is the demand that your past be disowned, your history rewritten, yourself reduced to an empty page—on which the newcomer can scribble whatever story suits them. And the newcomer trembles at night waiting to be written off as well. Destroying the past and subtly suggesting the past was painful and a new glorious time has arrived only sharpens the past when the new glorious time dims, the gold becomes a distant glitter and the cruelty of reality returns and you can never go back to all the ones who were loyal before but were abandoned to please the newcomer. There will never be coffee with a friend, or a shared moment with a child, because the newcomer finds that to be a threat. And the ones left behind, and the one who must be "loyal" remember the words of the ABBA song, "But what can I say?/Rules must be obeyed."