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19. it takes one to know one
Barbs often said, 'You'll always have to be on guard with him, because he sees love as weak'. I knew that anytime I went to love him, he would see me as weak. Since he is weak himself, what he offers is the thin veneer of confidence and sanity. He thought that physical closeness during sex gave him permission to be physically close with his fists. He is all front. He crushes and stamps out things that he sees as weaker than himself if he can. If he can he must. He takes pleasure from the suffering of others, because it makes him feel stronger. It reminds him that others are also suffering. Those whom he perceives as weak are, in his own mind, just as weak as himself. This keeps his cowardly heart company. He doesn't realise that it is in suffering and during our darkest hours that we are strongest, even though we mightn't feel it at the time. And he doesn't realise that it is through love that we find our strength and courage. So he doesn't accredit his own suffering or the suffering of others as having anything to do with strength or courage. He is running in the opposite direction to all things good. To him I represent strength and courage, the things that he most desires and is afraid of. His desire makes him needy, which is his idea of loving, and his fear makes him hateful. So half the time he feels like he loves me and the other half he feels like he hates me. Like all damaged people who must nurture and put their dreams into broken-down trains, I thought there was this darker side that could be dragged out into the light and exposed to love. But touch his terror and he wants to kill. He is so deeply afraid that he will kill anything that he perceives as attempting to touch him. 'They're trying to destroy me!' he shrieks. All arms are reaching into the room of his loneliness, to drag him out into the busy streets, where he will be exposed for who he really is. He has not got the courage to die these small deaths. He becomes skeletal in his room on his own and putrefies. Now I realise that some part of him is simply Frazer. The part of him that wasn't battered and made sick, by the parents, or by the society that treats its children as appetisers, and its teenagers as the main course, so that by the time they are adults they are almost finished off. Each and every one of them arrives, half-starved and half -eaten, in order to consume the opposite sex for dessert. I want that small surviving part of him that rests like a jewel somewhere deep inside him. There must be a part that wasn't destroyed. But I can't get anywhere near it. It is guarded by countless armed monsters from the good old days. They are saying, 'Here she comes Trash. She's trying to destroy you. She's going to destroy you Trash. You and all of us. Even though she knows that we are protecting you. Do you really want to die?' And so he would see me die first, along with the very feelings of love that had called him into his own birth. Ironically, this is the very thing that he perceives as his death, and he perceives that this death is physical. I do not understand him completely. Perhaps this is what he was feeling, when I tried to drag him out of my car that day, in front of the police, by his shoe. For now part of me wishes I hadn't done this to him. But I also know that any revenge taken, or anger and sadness vented, in the name of him, was for my own survival. As it turns out we were both each other in part, having dragged each other up out of the sewerage beneath the street. My mistake had been dragging the gem up, rather than noticing the diamonds all around me already shining in the sun. I believe that diamonds shine in the winter air like hexagons, they follow your eyes up and down, when all this time I had been looking along the ground for bits of solid rock to lug around and make my shoulders heavy. I had again been confusing love with pity. I said, 'I am sorry that I can't tolerate our relationship anymore, but I was confusing love with pity. I really must go now, I'm beginning to feel sorry for you again'. He wants me to mistreat him, always perceiving this as love. But I don't want to mistreat him and so there is conflict. The monsters make him into trash. They will beat and beat me until I take hateful action. For their continuance they want me disposed of. If I allowed the beating to continue I would be dead. So I took action and they admired my strength from that dark fleck in his blue grey-eyes. The eyes were preparing a gaze that told me that ultimately he would not take responsibility for his monsters. These are very dangerous people that will not do this. My final action was in leaving for good. I was going to a place where he couldn't destroy me, and where I was no longer a threat to him. The withered arms of the battered diamond jewel reach out from back inside a subterranean sewerage canal. They use every trick in the book, to haul me back, to where I know I will be mauled. 'Save me! I love you forever! I need you more than ever, save me!' They cry out appealing to both my compassion and to my loneliness. It is the most appalling sound, as though I am abandoning an old dog. I am desperate too, but one day I do not go back to him. I cannot go back in there, even though I still love him. My struggle against the pain of my loneliness makes me strong. Occasionally, he follows me and sits outside my house in his car, lost and confused. But he is still unable or unwilling to do a thing about his situation. In loving him and myself equally, I again had to take all responsibility, by keeping the blinds shut. I distracted my energies into saving the world elsewhere, where I can survive at the same time. Some parts of the world are too lost to be recuperated. They are completely annihilated beyond my control. I find out that it is only after facing my own powerlessness that I am able to give to others responsibly. I achieve this by withdrawing, and by allowing them to clean up the mess they have created themselves. |
