Simply Because I Could...

What I might have done yesterday, and who I might have been may be different today as I sit in my leather chair in the trailer I call home thinking on these things, but those decisions are gone. They are made like the bed I lay in. I must let them go or for sure they will strangle me in the sheets my mind rolls around in. I don’t want to think of him, but I can’t help it, and sometimes my brain beats so fast I need to drink beer or wine or something to deaden the thoughts that will otherwise rip right out of my mind if not pushed into a mewl with the alcohol.

I wished I smoked again. I wished I could suck back thick bands of smoke into my lungs so I would have something to gag on. Something’s better than nothing. Even black tar is better than the empty gags of despair.

I finished choking out my soul two years ago, but the stench of vomit lingers and the tentacles of what was done still strangle me today. I thought I knew evil. I thought evil was the boogey man grabbing my ankles as I dropped my feet off my bed when I was nine. I thought evil was lurking in the basement, clanking metal with expanding heat as it reached up to me with midnight sounds freezing me in fear. Four-year-old fears are nothing. If only I could lay frozen, at least I would be freed from despair. Frozen doesn’t feel.

He was a bad man.

I thought bad men looked bad, and I thought that bad men lived in jail or in books written by Stephen King. I thought bad men had crooked teeth and smelled like decay and you could spot them with eyes and smell them easily. That’s why God gave us senses you know, use them to sniff out the rotten. I never expected I would be friends with a bad man. I never expected Satan to be so friendly. I never thought laughing with the devil would feel so good. I thought bad man raped bodies, I never knew a mind could be raped, until mine was left naked and bleeding and raw and broken in the back alley under a red neon light blinking ‘open’. Open.

I think of him today as he twists back into my brain, as I type what he was with my fingers on this keyboard into a story that starts with despair. The prompt is a cruel one. You can’t write about despair unless you have lived it. To write it I must revisit it. I dip back into that day I was gagging out my soul over the bathroom sink in the little trailer I call home. And the ache in my chest pulls, and the tears in my eyes well, and the vibrations of who I am now because of what he did then, tremble. I will never be who I was before I met him. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing I’m trying to live through. I suppose when my hands tremble with age, when arthritis prevents me from speaking stories with a pen, when time bends me over in prayer for release from this world I’ll have a better idea, I hope. But I don’t yet know that do I.

So you want despair? You want me to entertain you with my own? Mine danced like marionettes pulled with nylon strings, bending wooden arms and wooden knees in a puppet show I never knew I was in. I always wanted the lead in the play. Look at me now; I am Judy, punched. Red velvet curtains close in the empty theatre that echoes with the quiet of yesterday. That’s despair.

I stood at the edge of a river and long to drop into the darkness, I thought perhaps the cold rapids would smash my skull against the boulders. I was hoping bone fragments would splinter and my aching brain would oozes in release. And if not that, then at the very least the glacial water would fill nostrils and lungs and bloat my body until the weight of it sank with relief. God held my shirt tail as I hung over that river bank willing the waters to kill me and he He whispered in my ear, 'the feeling will pass, it might not be today but I promise you, the feeling will pass.' Logic knew it was true. Logic didn't make the journey better. I let him hang on. I had nothing to lose. That is despair.

Maybe in my writing it freedom will be found, maybe it will be like bringing back an old, faded picture, retouching the black and whites taken with photo glass, dotting them with color. I remember once seeing a photo of the house where my mother lived as a child. It was black and white, and it looked old like her. Last year she went back and returned with a photo of the same house, it was full of color, like time had made it alive instead of dead. Maybe that’s what this will be like, maybe I’ll make alive that which is dead. With words anyway.

I wrote a book. I wrote it to protect others. I wanted to let them know Satan is kind, and if deception was noticeable, it wouldn’t be deception. I thought I knew what Satan was, wings, and fire, and brimstone and all of that. I had no clue he would be kind, that we would become friends, that I would entertain him, and he would entertain me. I had no clue I would bite at his shiny objects like a crow pecking garbage. My mouth bleeds from my beak, maroon drops spread on the floor. My toes squish it around. It laps like waves, licking and licking and licking at my castle of sand, trying to destroy my home with a forked tongue. I pick at the grains and lay them back on top in layers of logic desperately trying to understand what happened, how it happened, how I let it happen, and what do I do now?

And how do I continue after I’ve stood at the edge of hell, my skin still burning, seared from the flames of betrayal? I thought he was a good man. I thought he was my friend.

I’m nobody’s friend

I play with you.

I played with you.

I twist and turn and become everything you want me to be simply to see how much I can get from you, but that’s not even the real motive, tisk, tisk, you silly little girl, I play with you

Simply

Because

 I

Can.

I weave stories, I plot, I plan, I become other people, I simply pretended, and you simply believed. It was wonderful watching you. The excitement you had when you thought you could help so many people, I knew that was important and I simply suggested things and watched you bite. You were nothing to reel in. I simply made you my friend, it’s easy to do with people like you, you know the kind, the lonely ones, the ones who never were picked, the ones on the sidelines, the ones who never made friends, there are so many of you pathetic creatures wandering around, I roll my eyes with the ease of you, you handed me envelops of money and I folded it and placed it in my pocket and I thought of the red Staples Button, and I slam my fist upon it, ‘That was easy.”

I made you my friend, I singled you out because you were kind. Did you know kindness is the playground of the liar? Boy did I play. I made you feel like you could change the world, “Invest with me, and together we can help the world,” I said. Don’t you know, even fucken’ God doesn’t do that... you were so easy, so naive.

People just want to believe that someone like me exists in their life… the thing they want to exist, not the real me that devours them…

I am many

I am the Grifter

I am the Scam

I am the Con artist

I feasted on you because you let me, and I smiled as I chewed your trust and licked my lips as the fat of your kindness dripped off my chin.

I left you gagging over the bathroom sink without a blink

I found another one even before you were gone

I am the con

I am deception

I never stop

Leave the Baptists the Protestants and the Catholics to feed you a Satan with fanged teeth and pointed wings, while you are kept busy looking for him under your bed I come in, on the wind of kindness and let my evil to bite in. Did you you know your faced glowed while I did it?

You called me friend.

I let you.

You will not come closer to evil than when you stood next to me…

Go back and gag out your soul, you should never have played with me in the first place, but you were willing, so I let you.

What I might have done yesterday, and who I might have been may be different today as I sit in my leather chair in the trailer I call home thinking on these things, but those decisions are gone.

I’m one more victim of a con.