I breathe, deeply, letting the air rush from my lungs in an almost gasp, and I stay silent. My jaw clenches in an effort to hold back the tirade that surges against my teeth like a tidal wave, sharp and salty, it stings. Sometimes, when I’m almost sure I’ll burst because I can’t stand it anymore, a fine tremor shivers through the inside of me and my eyes close in slow motion. It’s exaggerated, that slowness. Like counting to ten while wishing away the monsters under your bed, maybe when I finally open them again you’ll have disappeared. Vanished into thin air like a bad dream, leaving behind only a racing heart and a fading feeling of unease. I should be so lucky.
Fate placed us side by side, surely no choice of mine. When you set up your nest next to mine I knew it was ill fortuned, but what could I do? Mine is not the choice to make, such things are decided by more powerful people than I. Your proximity is dangerous, and it eats at me daily. You burn, every day, simmering with the poison of your lifetime’s choices and their deadly by-blows that multiply as demented rabbits. How can it be that you don’t hear yourself, how you sound, venom dripping from your lips, anger and frustration shimmering off you like a haze, every – single – day. Is that why you walk so quickly, talk so quickly? Are you, like a shark, in constant motion by sheer necessity? For surely such high metabolism is the only thing that keeps that poison from eating you alive, you have to eat it first. Stillness might very well mean death, but you’re dying anyway, wasting away to taut skin over brittle bones.
My skin crawls with the nearness of it, your poison leaking over the meager barrier between us and hissing as it trickles in through my ears. Slowly that venom has seeped its way inside of me, settling into my brain and heart like a secret well of dark and bitterly scented hate. It gathers there, quietly, drop by drop it grows deeper and more fathomless in every way. Dark things have taken up residence there. Moving silently beneath the surface they are blind eyed and sharp toothed. I am exquisitely aware of what your poison is doing to me. I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness when I feel those dark things stir in me, rising up towards the surface, drawn to your endless ichor and clamoring to reach daylight.
A better person would ignore you, set up some sort of metaphysical barrier, a shield that would protect me from your contagion. I would be able to virtually stopper my ears, but for that we needs work together, you and I. I could look on you with pity and move on. Move on, or make peace. A stronger person would be untouched. A kinder person would feel compassion. A wiser person would rationalize. I am not that person. I am the person who came to realize one bright summer morning that if I found out you were dead by some grace of god or happenstance, I would breathe a sigh of relief. I can already imagine the weight lifting from my heart in grateful freedom. The truth hit me, unblinking and naked in its honesty, and who am I to call it ugly or unkind? I didn’t ask for any of this.
I pray for grace to wash me clean of you and call it kindness that I might not become you instead.
