Worthy

A meditation on an encounter I had with a rather raw and visceral kind of love.

I’ve spent the last 6 months and another 23 years before that trying to come to terms with the weight in my chest. It has always seemed to be there humming to itself, quietly at first, but now it is all consuming. It has had room to grow, room to tie a rope from my spine and search through my mind for any and all memory that utterly destroys, it then hangs them there. Dangling from the rope, a constant reminder of how I felt, how I am feeling and potentially how I always will feel. 

Somewhere I don’t recall where, the seed was planted. The weight was left to grow. 

From the seed some kind of hideous creature was born. It was pale, lanky and thin. It’s arms too long for its body, its legs so thin they could break under its own weight at any moment. It’s rib cage on the verge of protruding through the pale sheet of lifeless skin that covers its pointy angled bones. It’s eyes so large and glaring desperately searching the dark for anything to love, but there was never anything or anyone around. It feeds itself and its miserable effort to find love by feasting on the utter lack of love that it has for itself. So strong was this sense of disgust in itself, that it somehow willed the hatred for itself into a physical substance which the creature then gorged on. Feeding itself. 

Everything I have seen in my life, everything I have done, the creature has seen and done too. It lives an inch inside. constantly unflinching, it never blinks, for it might miss an opportunity to damage itself further. We have spent so long in unison that we have actually become unity. United in our cause for self destruction. My life stumbled on. Rolling itself neatly into some contorted shape that was easy to lift, to throw away, to utterly disregard.

Then I met you.

Golden skin covered your perfect bones. Curvature which ignited my most innermost desires. I wanted to own you. I wanted you to own me. You had eyes like mine. I could tell there was something living just behind them. I had to know you, so I could know myself. 

Over the course of weeks our bodies joined amongst a mist of confusion, submission, domination and love. Each time I was inside you I felt the creature move around inside of me. It stopped trying to eat itself. The moment when my body would leave yours and I would slide down next to you in utter release I could actually hear the creature singing. The most beautiful song I had ever heard. 

There were times when you would turn to me, cradling my soul to your breast allowing me to burrow deep inside. There where times where you would turn away, annihilating me with deep sighs and requests for time alone. 

I still cut my teeth to the thought of the night when you sought refuge in me. When you told me about your father, a man you barely knew but hated so strongly. Your mother, a woman you knew so well, and the fact that you can see some remnants of her in you and you hated that about yourself. When you told me about the man in Argentia and what he did to you. The faceless figure that I have killed in my mind so many times. In the most gruesome of ways. My possession of such a ravenous desire to make him suffer truly scared me. Could I be capable of hurting someone so badly? If they had hurt you I do believe that I would be able to bypass my mechanism for empathy. This was the night where my creature put its mark on you. When you bared yourself to me truly. More than just flesh, more than just bone. It’s you and only you that it wants now. This was when I realised you had a creature too. Maybe it was even more damaged than mine.

The nights when you would want me, when my submission felt desirable to you, when I would make love to you and you would simply f**k me, the creatures under our skins would dance and revel in harmonious joy. For they were getting what they wanted. My creature was finally feeling the kind of things that it has always wanted to. In that moment it felt it was worthy. The creature in you got its satisfaction from the knowledge that there was something you could control, something you could dominate. For the first time in your life, you had all the power, you were the decider. Not your father, not your mother, not that man who hurt you. You were god there, in those two rooms, mine and yours, You were god there. 

My creatue would only eat from your hand, and when you took your hand and you turned away from me it resorted back to it’s learned process that it knew so well. It had to tear itself apart again. 

I am not worthy of love. I do not deserve happiness. How could anyone or anything love me. 

It has been 6 months now. You have left, emotionally long ago but soon physically. The creature has complete and utter dominion over me now. I have even began to walk in its ways, I only seem to be able to hear what it says to me. The brief respite from its feasting has only made it angrier and hungrier than before. This could easily be my life. It would simply require me to continue to allow things to be the way they have always been.

But in that brief respite that you granted me I saw some kind of light. A dim one that shone through your bedsheets and out your window and rested on the horizon. For the first time both my body and mind felt the fact, briefly so briefly I heard my spine untangle and whisper to me, I am worthy of this feeling, I am worthy of love. Now you have left me that brief moment of ecstasy feels almost unreal, but I know, with every piece of bone I possess that I felt it. They can’t lie to me because they were there. Intertwined with yours. For that split second they felt it too. 

I am Worthy. I deserve happiness. 

It’s still a seed. Sharing room with the creature that continues to languish in desolation. Although maybe one day soon the creature will have to learn to share the space behind my eyes with something else. Something pure. Someone that feels worthy of love. Someone who will not utterly submit himself in order to get it. I have a feeling. It will be the most strenuous of wars. But they will have to learn to dance together under the harvest moon, while the trees that line the edges of my memory will rustle loud with thoughts of you.