Over My Shoulder

To whom it may concern,

I don’t know whether I should be writing this letter. I’m not sure that I can. I think I’m writing it to see if I have it left in me to do this one last thing. Perhaps I’m writing it as a final defiant act. To prove that I was right all along. If you’re reading this then it has not only happened, it is done. That which should not have happened has occurred. I’d hoped with all my heart that it would not be so, but the flame of my hope has grown weaker with every passing hour and now, as I look upon it I’m not so sure I see a true light, only a flicker of honest deceit that I provided myself in order to draw a little comfort in a world grown cold, hostile, malevolent and endlessly hungry.

I’m John Hunter and I‘ve been incessantly betrayed in the most despicable of ways by our daughter. I should’ve known this was coming, because she was betrayed by her own father and he was himself betrayed. And so it goes. My betrayal was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before it came a-knocking on the door of my life.

The sins of the father. 

We all know how that works. And yet we kick against the truth of a matter which does not suit us. We choose to live an increasingly painful lie to avoid acknowledging how things really are. Acceptance sets us free from a trap such as this, but somehow we see that acceptance as damning and so we struggle on, moving deeper into a darkness that seeps into our very soul, torturing us and feeding on the light of our life and the energy of our goodness until we are too broken and damn well tired to do a single thing about it.

I think that’s the worst of it. I saw our daughter give up. She gave up on herself and her life and she turned on us instead. Now I’m following suit in giving up. There’s no point. There’s nothing of worth left in this world. Nothing for me anyway. The saving grace is that I’ll not seek vengeance for this fate of mine.

I saw it coming and I did nothing about it. Instead I did everything I could for her. She was our daughter, our beautiful daughter. But now I know that her father’s betrayal was about taking that beauty away from her. Taking it away from the world that he so hated and loathed.

How do you do that?

How do you take beauty away from the world?

You take and you keep taking, and what you take most of all is meaning. Beauty speaks to us and it speaks meaning. It’s the meaning of beauty that floods our hearts with love and invades our minds with endless possibilities and love-filled outcomes. Beauty is a dream made real. Beauty is the reflection of our very souls. Meaning is the source of beauty, and it’s the blood of the universe. We seek meaning in order to live. We need it just as much as we need the light and warmth of the sun. Without it, we would freeze and become something other than what we were always destined to be.

Without meaning, we are lifeless. Which is to say, we are already dead. Dead men walking. Only no one mourns us when we are in this state and few will mourn our passing when our bodies eventually fall back down into the dirt from whence we came.

I mourn. I grieve. I’m locked into a perpetual state of grief. I’ve lost so much and the loss continues. I’m bleeding out and try as I might, I cannot staunch the flow. Everything I am and everything I was, is not enough. It was never enough. I was never enough.

The brutal fantasy I’ve been drawn into blinds me to the reality that kept me safe for so long. I slept walked from the path of life and into the darkness of this dire existence. I did so in good faith, but the devil does not care about such things. The devil does not care about anything. All he has is his filthy urges and dark desires, and he is forever hungry.

I understand our daughter now. I really think I do. She told her mother, my dear wife Sally, “I want to hurt you until you understand.” She said this more than once. Once was too often. It was the darkest of threats. On Sally’s death bed, our daughter leaned in and whispered into the ear of the woman who should have been her mother, but that she had distorted into something so wrong and terrible. Our daughter fashioned her own mother into a travesty of a thing. She moulded her into a thing made from the lies and abuse of her father.

I was there as she leant in to breath yet more darkness into the woman I loved, and I did nothing. I wanted to, but time itself held me back. It dragged me away so that I saw it all from the other end of a dank and disorienting tunnel, but still I saw it clearly enough. What that facsimile of a girl was doing to poor Sally as she lay dying. Even in her final moments, she could not afford her own mother a single chance at peace. She was relentless in her abuse of the woman who brought her into the world and loved her in a way that only a mother can. I saw her breath that evil into Sally’s mind and I witnessed the pain that ensued. Sally’s face crunching up in a mask of agony and then falling apart as her final breath escaped her body.

A mother slain by her own daughter.

Now you understand.

I heard those whispered words. They played out in my head. The dread conclusion to our daughter’s campaign of vengeance against a mother who had loved her daughter even unto the bitter and painful end. Our daughter sought vengeance against a world that looked on dispassionately as her own father withheld his love, chose not to be her father and instead tortured her. Tortured her body and assailed her mind in order to get to her soul and possess and violate it. 

When she’s at her worst, I see him. I see him and only him. She recedes until there’s nothing of her left. I’ve watched as she changes. She plays to her audience. The transformations are subtle and brutal. Few people see what she’s doing to them, let alone the danger that lurks behind the mirror she presents and hides behind. She has become adept at hiding in plain sight. She has watched and learnt from those around her. Picking the best aspects and incorporating them into her mimicry so that those around her see only what they want to see and are blind to what she really is. She uses us against ourselves. We do the work for her. Time and again, I’ve questioned why anyone would do what she does. But then I see how perfectly she operates in our midst and I think that is all the answer I will ever receive. 

She does it because she can.

She presents the world she hates with a show, and the single actor in that show is the best version of all the people around her. She’s a model citizen and she’s as clever as they come. I once wondered at this. I’ve seen how badly broken she is. I know how twisted and tortured she remains. So how can she out compete everyone?

Because she does not care.

She has no care for anyone, including herself. This frees her from any investment. There are fewer obstacles for her than there are for the rest of us. She’s not impeded by self-doubt and the crushing desire to get things right and be accepted. What she wears isn’t a benign attempt to fit in, it’s merely a surface of armour. She creeps into the midst of the enemy camp with only one intent. To make them pay dearly.

Because she’s owed.

Her entitlement is an extreme. She’s vengeance itself and that is all that is left to her. To make the world pay for what it allowed to happen to her. The world knew and yet it never once stopped him. The world was there while it all happened and it did not care. And afterwards? The world was not there for her. The world was never there for her. Her father was right after all. The world is a terrible place and she must fight it every step of the way. People are cruel. The only way to survive is to be something better than them and to get the first shot in. Hurt them first and keep hurting them so that they can never hurt you.

None of it should’ve ever happened. She deserved better. But I can’t take it back. Try as I might, I couldn’t take it from her. I wish I could. I wish with every fibre of my being I could help her to be the person she was always destined to be.

And that’s why I’m here. Trapped by my desire to help. My love for her and the family we once were holds me captive whilst she plays out an absolute inversion of my dearest wish. I can’t take it back. It doesn’t work like that. But she can take from me. She can take it all. And she has. She’s taken more than I ever knew I had.

I’m sitting downstairs with the lights out. The curtains are open and the light from the halfmoon bathes my surroundings in a surreal light. I cannot bring myself to close the curtains or to switch the light on. I’m not sufficiently present to manage such tasks anymore.

She’s taken so much already, but I feel no lighter. Instead there’s a weight that increases with my every breath, and that crushing weight terrifies me. I’m being filled with something unspeakable. As she takes everything that means something to me. As she steals my meaning, she creates a void. The darkness that resides within us all is moving upwards and filling me and now I know it for what it is. I find that I cannot stop it. I’m too late. Always too late. 

This is a torture without end. This is a well of infinite pain. Thus far I’ve prevented myself from peering into the abyss that pulses and whispers, inviting me to join with it. I’ve been tempted to dip my toe into the dark ice of those evil waters and welcome the ensuing numbness that they promise. I’ve been sorely tempted to give myself over to the darkness. There’s a powerful lie in that temptation. The prospect of joining Sally once again and regaining what I hold most dear is dangled before me. But I know it to be a lie. I know there’s only the hell of isolation yawning hungrily before me.

This weight pressing upon me has become too much. I want to die, but doubt that I can. However much I’m fed upon, there will always remain a piece of me which stubbornly refuses to die. This is an eternal trap and I’m beginning to doubt that death will be a release, only a step further towards an eternal pain that is my punishment for failing to save our daughter from that monster. And then failing all over again when we failed to save her from herself and the harm she was intent on doing. 

I lived for Sally, but now she’s gone. She’s gone with a finality and totality that should not be possible. We returned from her funeral earlier today. Our daughter immediately sloped off upstairs to her room. Depriving me of her company. An act of abandonment that is a part of the cycle of her abuse. Neglect and disconnection until she deigns to find me and take from me. I walk barefoot on broken eggshells of glass, and I cower in a place that was once our home but is now her lair. I hear her moving around up there and I dread the sound of her presence. I’m ashamed of how frightened I am of the girl who grew up in our midst and has become something I can no longer bare to look upon.

I look about me for signs of Sally, but she does not haunt this place. There’s nothing left of her in this world. Those we love haunt us, but there’s no love in this place. Not anymore. The last of it leaked out into the world with Sally’s final breath.

Sitting here in my own personal hell, I write this note so that someone may read it and possibly understand. But I know my efforts are futile. It’s all pointless. You see, before I even put pen to paper I was afraid that I did not have the words. And then I worried that I would falter and fail as what little energy I have left leaked from me before I could express myself for what may be the very last time.

But what I find myself thinking about most of all is betrayal. Betrayal is a word that goes around and around in my head, goading me and slashing at what little sanity remains to me.

He betrayed her and she was never the same again. Now she betrays us. Only there’s no us anymore. Sally has abandoned me and in that abandonment I feel only betrayal. The nature of it horrifies me. 

They called it suicide, but I knew better. I say it in her eyes. Sally lied. She said she had taken the poison that bestowed upon her an agonisingly slow and painful end made worse for her clinging on stubbornly to her life. She covered up her own daughter’s crime, sacrificing herself in a final act of hope. Leaving me alone to deliver on a hope that we could never deliver when we were together. Sally passed me a baton that I did not want to take, and now I have it, I cannot let it go.

I can hear our daughter stalking around upstairs, and I know she means me harm. She’s told me often enough; I want you dead and out of the way. She moves around conspicuously so that she can threaten me even when we are apart. She’s hypersensitive and hyperaware. She hears me. She smells the acrid fear that now pours from me in the sauna of her hatred.

Sally and I always thought we’d see it coming. I certainly thought I’d be the first that our daughter would try to kill. Maybe she has and I’ve been oblivious to the attempts. I wonder when Sally knew. Sally never said a word to me, even in the hospital when it was all coming to a tragic end, and that in itself was a betrayal.

Then there’s my betrayal. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be so meekly accepting of such a dire fate. I no longer know what it is that has kept me here. Misguided loyalty was a part of it once. Then there was only a residual belligerence. I didn’t want to admit defeat. I couldn’t afford that, even in the face of so much hurt and pain, my will to count for something has remained.

Besides, who would have believed me if I had spoken the truth of it? I had this notion that I could only have left if I could get those around me to understand just how bad it had gotten. Truth is, I never had it in me to try. 

That is the ultimate betrayal; to deny a person’s truth.

There were people who saw a glimpse of what our daughter’s father was about and they said nothing. Not even to themselves. There are people who know that our daughter is not well, but they refuse to look too closely. They don’t want to get involved. They don’t want to be drawn into the darkness that they feel when they are around her. She’s as dangerous as it gets, and our fear in the face of that danger weakens us. Separates us. Isolates us.

It's betrayal that created this mess and it’s betrayal that will perpetuate it. I once thought it was a trap of lies, deceit and denial and that if I could only drag it into the light of truth and expose it to love that everything would be right in the world. But I misunderstood and my misunderstanding was yet another betrayal. 

The final betrayal will not be whatever our daughter has in mind for me. It’s you. You see, I expect that whoever reads this will turn their back on the truth contained in these lines and walk away from it. My words will burn in the ice cold fires of betrayal, just as my soul will burn. 

Sometimes a person doesn’t deserve what happens to them, and some of the broken souls in hell don’t deserve to be there. They were betrayed and once the betrayal began there was no way back for them, because betrayal is a dark gift that just keeps taking. I feel that cold fire already. My end has come. The time I had left to escape this hell is down to a single grain of sand and that grain is sliding down the glass of fate even now. 

Now I can at last accept my fate at the hands of your betrayal. Just you be careful that you don’t succumb to the habit of betrayal though, it never ends well once betrayal gets a hold of your life…