What can be said about the relationship between Masochism and his Rolly Polly Princess of Power? Here’s a word. Unhealthy. Here’s a compound word. One-sided. There have been few relationnships I have seen that were more detrimental to a person. No man ever folded as fast when faced with the fury and power and will of a woman than Masochism did when his girlfriend got it into her head that something must be so.

With the Rolly Polly Princess of Power as his girlfriend, his life had become nothing more than a reoccurring lightning strike. He was now tightly locked in his own private and lonely Hell of which he himself held the key but refused to use. Masochism’s house was built of despondency and complaints without self-awareness. He resided in a Limbo where he had no faith in a life that could be changed, therefore he settled for something far less. He settled for something that was horrifically close to evil.

Masochism did not believe in himself, which meant he did not believe in anything close to living. He wanted more than what he had but did nothing to work for it, nay, seldom dared to dream of it. He did not attempt to find the energy to put a cohesive thought together to articulate what he might want. “Somethin' different. Maybe construction. I don'know.” That was the extent of him verbalizing a dream.

He ducked his head and trudged forward, not looking left nor right, just down. His eyes stung not with unshed tears but with the smoke of the chain smoking he dulled his senses with. He refused to stand up straight anymore. He slumped when he sat, slumped when he ate; his voice slumped as well, slurring his words as the vodka he drank cradled him in its cerebral-numbing embrace. Masochism hated his life, his girlfriend, his job, his car, his room, himself but most of all he hated that he still had a one dream left. He wanted to go back to college but he refused his father's help in doing anything about it. And his father did not stay on it. His life was literally going up in smoke as he wandered looking for something good to eat when, like his father, nothing tasted good. There was sadness in his slumpy, slurred voice when he sullenly would say, “What's the point.”

Thin to the point of emaciation, he never intentionally dieted though due to the smoking everything he put in his mouth “tastes like smoke” so in effect, smoking was his diet tool, or weapon. And his girlfriend aided and abetted his decline. It seemed as if Masochism was too world weary to care that his girlfriend hated him. Why they continued in a relationship was obvious though hard to watch. Masochism had become masochistic and she “was someone to be with so I’m not alone.” She, on the other hand, could not get a boyfriend to stay with her for longer than one or two nights. That she was a shrew simply goes without saying. That she verbally and physically abused him needs to be said and understood, both why she did it and his high tolerance for enduring it.

Masochism was not what she wanted in a boyfriend, future husband, and life mate. But it was all she could find and latch onto and she hated what he was. She knew, just knew, she deserved better. She was a large girl with an unattractive face more from her sour expression than any inherited physical traits. She believed she truly was a born-again princess who must learn humility by suffering through this lifetime with the common folk before her next incarnation would land her into the lap of wealth and fame and royalty she so richly deserved. So endure she must but not without letting everyone know how utterly disappointed she was with their lack of acknowledgement of her superiority.

Masochism endured because he felt he deserved it.

She graced the dismal dankness of Masochism’s home shared with his father in various outfits exposing more flesh that was appetizing and she did it with an ego so large it was hard for the cigarette smoke to find a place to delicately lift and swirl. The Rolly Polly Princess had her own key, made after she stole Masochism’s key and made a copy for herself. She would use it to come to the apartment after Masochism and Lies to Himself would leave for work. She would eat their food, watch their pay-per-view, make phone calls on their landline, and avoid job hunting. After about four or five hours, she would call her mother and say she was simply exhausted from a harrowing day of job hunting and wanted to meet her out to go shopping “pretty please, so I have a new outfit to wear to go job hunting tomorrow?” The girl knew what she was doing and played everyone like a violin.

She would then come over after Masochism got home from work and called her. She would use her key and walk in. Let’s use descriptive writing here for the full effect. She stalked in, her large thighs rubbing together as she moved into the apartment creating a smell suspiciously like sulfur such was her evil intent. She would snap her fingers, and point to his room. That was the extent of her conversations with him until they got behind his closed door. Then she would proceed to berate him as the worthless individual he was and why she stayed with him, well, he needed to thank her over and over for her steadfastness in their relationship, a relationship she suffered from so. She would tell him he needed to find “a more macho job, a job I can be proud to tell my friends you do. Something with a gun like a cop, or maybe a firefighter.” And inevitably Masochism would sigh. That was all. He would just sigh. She would get angry and it was widely known, though never witnessed, that she would slap him hard across his face in her total disgust with him.

In turn, Masochism chose not to fight for himself. He never told her it was wrong to hit him. He never told her to leave and never come back as he had his friends. He simply attacked himself in the shape of the countless cigarettes he stuck in his mouth day in and day out. His face always stared at the floor but when he raised it, his eyes were those of a gelding at a small, traveling carnival whose job it was to walk in a circle around an ugly, iron axis, locked into repeating over and over that small circle, the first circle of Hell, Limbo.

Have you ever stood and watched those sad little beings? Pick out a pony and watch. His eyes are almost always closed until the moment when a more imaginative child would pretend to gallop across the plains and smack his little furry face repeatedly with the reigns that took them both nowhere. Then the little horse would again close his eyes against the reality of this endless punishment of which no reason for it had been explained to him. Masochism’s eyes were always half closed as well. Both knew their rut. The little pony would be unhitched at the end of his day of blindly walking that forever circle knowing he would be lead to it the next day and the next until his death. He was doomed to blindly walking that circle with his little horse mind possibly being tormented by dreams that faded in and out, the color of them changing over time to a sepia toned photograph from old where the images of freedoms past were too far away to make out, but, oh, the desire to remember was a suffering unto which he had never known. So, too, did Masochism end his days the same way. He drove to a parking space in the crowded street outside the squat, white building that was home. He shuffled into his father's smoke-filled apartment sighing as he dutifully picked up the phone, methodically punching in the numbers of his Rolly Polly Princess of a girlfriend then wait for her to show up. She enters, snaps her fingers and he follows her, trudging into his bedroom, closing the door, and stepping over the dirty laundry covering the floor to lay down in the dark on his rumpled bed that smelled of old smoke, uneaten food, and lost dreams.

His room was a depressing heap of fast food trash, a forgotten, bare mattress on the floor left over from when he had had a friend stay all night to play video games, over-turned ashtrays, empty vodka bottles, and dirty, stained clothes, both his and the Princess’s. He is required to prove his love by doing her laundry. He also is required to pay her cell phone bill and buy her gas, “to drive over here to come see you.” It was a pit of despair where Masochism held his pity parties for himself. It was a cave where he caved time after time to a girl he cared nothing about and who cared less for him. It was a small room whose walls held the energy of abandoned hopes and very attainable, yet for him, unreachable dreams. It held the largest bottle of maximum strength Excedrin made. There is also a wall portrait of the Rolly Polly Princess of Power smiling with the banality of evil that it takes to do as she has done and not be arrested. The ashtray in front of her photograph shows horrifying evidence of his excruciating journey toward death.

Masochism smokes because he followed the crowd in high school. He started smoking even though it burned and choked him. He didn't have the strength to say no. He smokes now because he cannot stop. He is addicted. He does not care. His father smokes. His cousin, Self Entitlement, smokes and enjoys it. Masochism does not care if he's living or dying therefore he is already dead in the place that counts the most. Masochism's home is built of shattered dreams and resigned hopelessness. He has relinquished his autonomy. He indentured himself to his Rolly Polly Princess of Power yet all he has to do to free himelf is tell her to go away and mean it. Put his foot down. Be a human being who has found within himself something called dignity.

But Masochism has not tried to search for dignity or self-preservation. He was thinking it was probably time in the course of his life to ask this evil Princess, the Rolly Polly Princess of Power to marry him. Other people he knows are getting married and she has been hinting at it making him pay for a subscription to Bride magazine and have it mailed to his apartment. He is who she returns to. He is her boyfriend, her only shot. No one else has wanted her for more than one night entertainment. She knows for a fact because she regularly cheats on Masochism telling him it is for his own good, so he can see how much she is wanted but he is her choice. And in his vodka soaked mind, he believes he deserves to be treated no better.

She owns him now, almost. It seems she is but days or weeks away from closing the deal and then will have a true legal claim to his what little money he makes making sandwiches. She is the Rolly Polly Princess of Power and will most likely be with Masochism until the day he dies, the date of which she has probably already penciled in.

She has crushed his spirit. She has finished breaking apart his dreams. Who else would want her but the soul-shattered? She is a cruel tyrant who buys him cartons of cigarettes for his birthday, their anniversary, and Christmas. She has manipulated him, murdered his mind, and slapped him into believing he isn’t worth spitting on if he were on fire. His father doesn’t notice. Only the Rolly Polly Princess of Power sees him. Only she has stayed with him. Only she cares enough to remind him of how much a loser he really is. He looks at her and sees a future devoid of love. He sees a hopeless lifetime spent trying to please a female who would see him dead before she’d sacrifice a kind word. But she is all he has. And he is all she has because it is only through Masochism can she find a mate.

I will take a writer's pause in what is turning out to be an almost mini-epic story.  I have need of sustenance and a respite from this pitiful tale.  The next chapter will be about the third little pig, Self Entitlement and then his girlfriend whose name I will dangle as a small cliffhanger.  It begs to be asked, what kind of girl would hook up with a pig with a name like Self Entitlement?