W is for … WTF
SWEET words sour in the glare of truth. They shrivel and shrink blink and say goodbye.
You’ve learnt some things on your life’s journey, and boundaries are one of them.
You take responsibility for your well-being, and excise the rot, the putrid fetid stink that rattles nearly ruins your temperate world. You wring its pock-marked neck and dump it.
You don’t look back.
For three months you are the efficient and diligent architect of a personal hell, you construct your misery with fortitude.
Yes, you build this house of pain carefully, brick by brick. It’s an edifice a monument to lost emotion.
Sooner or later she will trust me. Sooner or later we’ll fuck. Sooner or later she won’t say nasty things to me. Sooner or later she’ll sink into my arms. Sooner or later, please, sooner or later she’ll be sweet.
You step deeper and deeper into the mire, needy, scared, longing gnaws you.
She throws out morsels, measly scraps to a pandering dog.
You gobble them, hungry for her, you’re starving for affection.
Your heart gapes, gasping. See me, please. Love me.
WTF?
You crumple at the feet of chaos, pathetic you lie prostrate, simpering at the altar of cruel manipulation (it was crass, unflinching). Worse, you speak in a trembling baby voice, and beg!
Don’t go. Wait. I’ll cook. Etc.
Oh, the torment. Oh, the victim, forever pleading, forever waiting, wondering, wanting.
She accuses you of vile behaviour, and trumpets it in town.
Sies! You screw up your face like a concertina. You’re ready to burst into a litany of squeaky sorrow.
My God, is this you.
You parry the shouting, the insults, the lies, the threats.
You grab the straws of dear docile moments.
And then whoosh, she explodes. Again. And again.
WTF?
You draw the coat of denial tightly around you.
Person upon person tells you, beware. Get out of there.
Friends shake their heads. They look at you with puzzlement pity in their eyes.
Your guts it sprawls rancid in a bloody pool of sick.
You nearly drown, flailing desperate to please, to be loved, to belong.
She’s not worth it, a friend says. She doesn’t deserve you, says another.
Do you know what she says about you?
Hope smiles one evening when you talk intimately, sincerely.
We’re fascinated by each other, we say. Warmth dances in our eyes.
And then wack, she gives you the silent treatment.
WTF?
It is the coup de grace.
Overnight, your heart steels.
It purges the pull to be with her, this brittle shell, this duplicitous and dangerous wretch.
No more!
Your scattered bits meld. You see you feel the shape of you.
At last, you are the captain of the ship, the SS Who I Am.
You hoist the sails of succour. You quickly dislodge the anchor the mainstay of woe.
You must, you must sail the sea of tranquillity, the bow speeding to the sunrise.
You must, you must leave the dark of cultish platitudes, their fire fanned by broken wings.
WTF?
Who cares if her hurting hides a gentle thoughtful beauty?
There’s no room for soul pirates not on this boat!
(ends)