Dark Magic

Bad luck.

She tells me it was luck, that I had some luck and my luck was bad.

“It was not your fault,” she tells me this like it was something that happened in the past. A blip. The universe hiccupped and I suffered as a result.

She’s wrong.

They all are.

The words in my head remind me of that.

She’s wrong.

They are all wrong.

They are always wrong. Always and forever, wrong.

You are bad, luck has nothing to do with it.

I have many words inside of me, and they are all bad words. This is all that I know. That is all that I have ever known.

If luck does have anything to do with it, then I am having a big run of bad luck and that run will never end. This is me. This is who I am, and this is how I am.

Mother always told me that it would be like this. She was right. She called it, she predicted how my life would be and it has panned out exactly how she told me it would. Over and over she warned me about how people would be around me. How I would never fit in this world of theirs.

That I was different to all those people.

That I was no good, and I never would be.

Just like that no-good loser who fathered me.

Karen smiles warmly at me. I think it is supposed to be a winning and encouraging smile. It means nothing to me, because it does not matter. I mirror that smile. This is something I am good at. I watch them and I do the things that they want me to do and I say the things they think they want me to say.

Even someone who is totally bad can be good at something, and I am good at this. This is how I can be around people. This is how I survive.

I might not be good, but I can pretend to be good.

If I act the right way and say the things that are required then I will get through this. 

It’s hard though. The words. The dark words are my brand of bad luck and they never shut up. Never. However much I will them to quietness, they roll through my mind on a seemingly constant cycle of hurt and pain. 

There is nothing else.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing outside of me, and those words of mine, mean anything.

That world. The world that encases and suffocates me, is only pain. I breath in pain and it fills me a little more with each breath. 

Karen is lucky. She believes in luck. Only a person with good luck can believe in luck. She thinks she’s helping me. She is, but not in the way she thinks she is. 

Karen talks about dealing with things. She encourages me to talk, and so I do. Each week she helps me explore my issues and she sets me a task. I accommodate each and every challenge and that includes these flights of fancy into what she thinks are my issues. 

I talk about Mother. I talk about her quite a lot. After all, she is where all of this began. I am comfortable with talking about my Mother even though I hate that woman with every fibre of my miserable being. Karen says that this is encouraging, after everything that has happened.

I also talk about the people around me and difficulties that I have with them. I watch Karen as I talk to her. I am good at watching, I see the cues and the signs, and I adapt what I am saying so that she reaches the state that I want her to.

I give Karen what she wants.

I give Karen nothing.

This works out well for both of us, and now we are in our fourth year of therapy I have gotten really good at talking. We go around and around and around and I get better and better. Karen has told me that she thinks I am ready to end therapy. She doesn’t say that I am cured. She has been very clear on that. No one is cured. A cure implies that there is nothing more to be done and that is not how this life of hers works.

I nod, I know that is not how it works. It doesn’t work anything like the way Karen thinks it does. I look at her, in her pretty illusion of a life, and I pity her. I pity them all. They don’t see what I see.

They don’t have the words.

I am the lucky one. I see it all for what it is. Karen can call it bad luck, but at least it is real.

Mother told it how it was and I have taken her legacy and I have built upon it. I add to the words each and every day and with each successive word, there is more darkness. 

There can only be darkness in a world filled with lies. 

Darkness and pain.

If I were honest with Karen in the way she thinks she wants me to be, the way she thinks I am being, if I opened up and showed her what was inside, she would not understand. She is not equipped to deal with what I am. She stupidly thinks that she is, but she has never seen anything like the inside of me, and she never will. No one ever will. I cannot afford the secret of my true self to leak out into this ridiculous world, to open myself up like that would be to drown in all of the lies and I would be lost forever. So I have to hold on to what I am. I have to guard my precious, dark words and I have to be very careful. I have to protect the dark words at all costs, and I have to hide in plain sight. I have to go along with what Karen thinks is good when we all know that it isn’t.

He is there when I return to the place that I live.

“How did it go?” he asks me.

“Yeah good,” I tell him.

I tell him that because that is what he wants to hear. The no-good loser who fathered me. He doesn’t have a clue and he never will. Not even as I hurt him and then ease off and give him the false promise of something I could never deliver on, even if I wanted to.

There are only the bad words and with the bad words there is hurt and pain. 

I don’t know about bad luck, but I do know about bad magic. Sometimes, I say the words over and over again and I can feel them. I feel them grow and become more powerful and something rises deep within me, and it calls me to it. 

Every day I move closer to that place deep within me and further away from a world that has always lied to me and wanted something from me that I can never give it. It wants me to be like them, but I am not.

That’s my bad luck, but it is also theirs. 

I am almost ready to leave this place of his, the sad loser who has devoted his pathetic life to me and given up so much, but never given enough. Soon, I will strike out on my own. I will leave this fractured husk of a man and I will break him with my final act in his life, as I go I will reject him completely and utterly and I know he will never recover, there isn’t enough of him left to do so.

Out there is a world teeming with them, and I know exactly the type of person I want to single out for my special attentions. 

I have watched, I have learned and I have practiced.

Best of all, I have all these words, and these bad words are my powerfully dark spells. I can feel the bad magic coursing through me now.

It is time.

Whenever I enter one of their lives, their run of bad luck will begin, only they will be oblivious to it. I will charm, enchant and enthral. I will insinuate myself into their lives and then into their very hearts and minds. I know them all too well. They are easily read and easily pleased. I am their run of bad luck and they will never know that I am addicted to them, and from them I must feed.