I Wrote This Story.

I want to kiss it.

The twinkle in the tip of the shoe in my lap feels like looking into the eyes of a creature I conjured from inanimate leather, and I want to kiss it.

For a moment, I forget you're there, I forget the pain in my jaw, I forget the throbbing in my head, I forget the stench of cruelty that hangs in the air between us, like the breath of entwined lovers in the morning; there's nothing but me and the twinkle

I lean over and kiss it.

'You're so sweet.''

You say, as you shake your head at me.

And then stroke my chin in response to my words.

When you call me sweet it feels like you're telling me you feel sorry for me. Not sorry because you feel bad that I have to endure what you do to me. Sorry, because you think I don't understand it.

You look at me sometimes like I'm a child playing in my mother's dressing room; pretending I understand any of the tools of beauty that adorn her dresser, playing a game of make believe that depends on believing in fairy tales.

You look at me like I'm an innocent.

It's unsettling.

No one has ever looked at me like that. Maybe you don't mean it as such, but it feels like pity to me, when you look at me like I'm a little girl playing a woman's game, and tell me that I'm sweet.

Maybe you do mean it as such. It would be like you to pity me for having a heart. That's what you think, isn't it? I have a heart that is prone to the kind of sentimentality that makes one kiss a shoe; the kind of sentimentality that shows affection and vulnerability, and expects tenderness in response.

And you feel sorry for me.

You feel sorry for me because you know you're going to follow my display of tender affection, with a renewed fervour of violence.

You think I don't know. You think I kiss your shoe, and expect you to stop being so hard on me. I expect you to sweep me up in an embrace and kiss me out of death.

But your blow against my face comes as no surprise to me.

My nose-ring goes flying across the floor.

It makes me so wistful when you beat the jewellery out of my body, but I'm so enchanted, as well. The imagery is so violent. Pretty things ripped from my skin, lying broken and discarded somewhere on the floor; symbols of beauty, that I wear for you, robbed from me, by you.

Unnoticed, by you.

You look at me like you expect to see disappointment in my face, like you expect to see the evidence that I didn't see it coming.

It's there.  

The pathetic tears roll out of my eyes, like warm rivers out of a glacier. I do have a hopeful little heart. I trust you so much I believe you even when I know you're going to break your promises like the bones in my wrist.

That's why you think I'm sweet.

That's why you pity me.

You think I have hope.

You think I don't know just how real this game can get, but I'm not a sweet little girl, my love. I built this castle, I know everything about it. I grew the poision ivy and installed the shackles in the basement after I measured my ankles for them.

I brought you onto myself.

I know I deserve to have all the sparkling hope in my heart turned into a fine powder that you use to slowly poison me.

You don't have to look at me like that. You don't have to pity me for your perception that I don't understand what's coming. I kiss your shoe, not you, I know it has more of a soul then you do.

You don't have to feel sorry for me.

I know how this story ends.

I wrote it.