Do You Want To Play A Game With Me?

I think of our time together sometimes,not a lot but sometimes.

I guess it's the way you might remember a bad habit...a behavior

that you don't do anymore and for good reason. A feeling of pride that you've moved on, made yourself better in a process of recovery.

 

I do remember the game we played. How good you were at it and

how I learned from you, especially the patience.

How a resentment or hurt could be nurtured and fed over time

until it was suddenly released in a flash of rage one fine day when the

recriminations and weaknesses were being exposed in a bloody clash of raised voices.Insults, the secret, private hurts laid open to the air.

Shredded nerve endings screaming in agony.Such pain we inflicted

on the other.Some things,of course, words and phrases I will never

forget. I guess, for me that will be your legacy.

 

The essential you.

 

How you hurt me in ways that no one else ever will.

A woman who skinned me alive.

And left me for dead.

Something to be proud of in a way-your unique status.

No one will ever compare to you in my mind.

I'm sure, even now, you probably find some comfort in that.

How sweet the anger was and what a sense of power I felt at the sight

of you crumbled in sobs.Folded and helpless on the floor. There was an actual howling like a wounded animal might make.

A crushed bone in a steel trap, tender images destroyed, never to be as cherished as they once were before, so brutally violated.

How drained you were,at the end, when you were through with your

fighting for the day. How helpless.

We lived in a world so far beyond apologies.

 

It was rape in a way-what we did to one another.

Emotional rape.Taking something of certain purity and destroying it

in a way that it could never be whole again. Never really used again.

It was a strange interlude in my life...playing our game.With you...creating it as we went along. All the past relationships leading

up to this perverse joining of two people dancing our strange dance.

I think now that you were meant to play this game.

Conditioned and trained through your life to do this.

And what is my excuse?

 

How it stared with just the odd comment by you, the seemingly

harmless insult in front of others. I remember indulging you

with my calm smile. I loved you so much. I'm sure there were things I

missed but with time...everything becomes a little clearer. And so,

taking your lead, I too, began to play our game. With faltering steps, I

followed and learned. It was a tortuous path and I fell many times but

always got up to play some more.

The final blowup.

I would have to say it was a masterpiece of hatred.

How I heaped the humiliation and abuse on you with no end, playing on your most intimate weakness.And how you floundered for a time, panicked...unwilling to face the final truth. It took weeks to culminate,my behavior,atrocious. But when it finally arrived...well, it came with a finality about it, I think. Certainly, we both recognized it for what it was.

I really was quite good at it by then. My seige engine of hate crumbling you piece by piece. Thick walls falling. God, I was good.

But even so,you raised the stakes and took it to the ultimate level.

And that was the end.

Just boring details after that. Money spent and forms signed.

Silence and a peace of sort.The building blocks of memories gradually

reconstructed in a passable fiction of normalcy-just to tell acquaintances. Something to say when the subject came up, easily digeseted phrases. We certainly couldn't tell the truth, probably take hours to fully explain.

 

Thanatos is the Greek word for death wish.

Let's just say we indulged ourselves and went deeper and deeper

into explorations of a sort. Were they forbidden? The places we went...after awhile you don't care anymore about good or bad, healthy or sick. You just want to go. And go we did. We didn't care

anymore. It was our secret.

Our love secret.

And if we were ever to meet again,say on opposite ends of a round

bar in a happening place on a Friday night. Would we smile?

Would our bodies join together, sitting next to one another after some

time passed?

What would happen,I wonder?

Would it be sick, filled with old hurts?

Or would it be sweet with yearnings and touches in secret places

that only we knew of?

Just a game.

But I'm older now and had a very good teacher.

What about you?

Do you still play?

 

Do you want to play a game with me?