you are. Because you don't just have a venom to you, your very being is melded with it. It is everything that classifies you; it is what we speak of first and last in your wake; it is how you are seldom remembered. It did not take long for me to grow weary from tightly biting my jaws together and swiping the word you needed to hear the most far behind my molars with a bruised tongue: "pathetic". Yet I didn't rest, even with a sore face. I loved you true and so for that I made myself untrue. Now, untethered, I bark it freely. You, pitiable, are the image of a striking viper seeking flesh-- quickly vicious, and desperately centered on impressing through your demeanor, but utterly and wonderfully terrified within each of the thinned wires of nerves that inexplicably constitute as your brain. You hate everything you fear and you are everything you hate. You are pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, and I wish I was never so kind as to deny you that truth. I've come to learn all of which that is is always insistent on not being such.
1. I hadn't prayed in years-- it's not something I've ever really done with any sincerity-- but that one night you attempted and stopped responding to my texts (and then my calls), I did. I prayed, and prayed, and prayed. I prayed like a boy with my knees tucked up under me, interlaced hands folded against my forehead and my elbows on the bed's edge, shamelessly sobbing and begging for mercy from any god or master that would listen, for you to be okay. I asked for the suffering and atonement to be placed upon me in your stead. And when you finally told me you failed perhaps an hour or two later, I couldn't help but wonder almost instantly if it was a divine blessing. I wanted to tell you but I bit my tongue, whipped my back, and forced myself to move on from the incident as quickly as you always had.
2. The handful of nights you fell asleep on the phone with me, I couldn't bring myself to hang up for most of them. Even the ones where I had, I still hesitated. Though you barely made noise, or simply didn't at all, sometimes it didn't feel right to drop the call. I think a part of me wanted to make sure you got your rest while the other half just liked the concept of falling asleep with you. But each time I woke up you had already long killed the line, leaving me alone. My apparently pointless sentimentality made me feel like such a loser those mornings.
I want you to be mine but I don't want to be yours. I know what I'm doing when I do it but I convince you I never have. I will starve you on my evil so that the times where I am good you'll feel even hungrier, while I gorge myself on the fantasy of you: doting, isolated, and masticated. All only for-- and by-- me. Do you think the love a mutt has for his owner ever saves him from the kennel's needle?
I'm only able to convince myself I still love you when I imagine a completely different person; I cling onto a world where you are good, you do little evil, that love has changed you. Love has only ever changed me, however. As much as you (and I) may believe I yearn for the sight of your butcher's gown and stained concrete flooring, cattle always prefer the prairie. You won't have steak tonight.
I can't forgive you. I really don't think it is possible. One day, though, you'll hardly cross my mind. If I'm lucky, you won't at all. But maybe (if fate has it out for me) I'll see you in passing sometime and maybe, just maybe, in the unlikely scenario where I manage to not quickly turn tail, I could offer you some sort of curled-lip look before moving on. That's as close to forgiveness I can ever imagine giving you: one last little glimpse of a window you shattered as proof of both its repairment and the fact you'll never find yourself behind it.