I wake up alone. I’ve tossed and turned all night, rolling around with discomfort. My bladder reminds me that it needs to be emptied, but I lie there, semi-comfortable at last. I cling to the vestiges of sleep, wishing it could last forever. I look at the clock, remembering it’s set an hour ahead somehow and doing the math to understand the time. It could be 9 am or 3 pm. I sleep too much.
My cats are of an opposite opinion. “Mrrow?” They remind me they’re hungry. They love to eat. We all do; food is life. All but me, anyway. I used to love to eat.
“Hi, kitty,” she says and holds a hand out to her fur baby. He accepts pets, brushing his face up against her hand to show her he loves her. She gets up to urinate and then feeds her cats. One cat gets a handful of hard treats, doctored with Pet WellBeing’s Detox Gold and Comfort Gold. The other two share a tin of minced meat, similarly doctored. They are near the end of their life cycle, sadly, and soon she will have to say goodbye to her children for the last time.
She scoops the litter, flushing it down the toilet thanks to sWheatScoop brand of cat litter. No more icky build-up of stinky feces and urine, inside or out. No more festering germs or toxoplasmosis. Finally. It took almost a year to fix that. She’s sad it took her so long to detox them and get them clean of parasites. Her ex-husbands tried to kill them. And her.
She has been married in her heart nine times. Just once on paper. She never believed in the need for a ring to declare her fealty. That is, until now. Now she believes in prenuptials and everything, because people take her money and run. They steal everything she has to offer and then move along to a distracting bit of fluff, unhappy that she is growing leaps and bounds ahead of them. Without them.
She remembers again this life isn’t worth living anymore, not with all the callous bastards who would use and abuse her, gender and sex aside. God shared his judgment with her just that morning:
The majority of human beings don’t deserve to live. They choose to be bad people, no matter what. You are not a bad person, even now, after experiencing nearly everything there is to experience that would allow a villain to justify being a villain. Therefore, I sentence humanity to extinction.
She wishes it would come sooner. She pets her cats some more, happy to give her children her limping love. She limps physically, emotionally, and spiritually, narrowly escaping the most villainous villain of all-time: Judas.
We have a special plan for that Judas. He made up Jesus Christ, you know. Based on the most spectacular human being in all creation. I won’t tell you who she is now, but rest assured, you are worshiping a figment of the imagination. Not only that, but a torture and murder device from the days of yore: the cross.
She exits her apartment, traveling to where her sick parents dwell. They’re old and stricken with many various ailments in their old age. They’re struggling to eat and stay alive. They don’t even take care of themselves anymore, if you could say they ever did. Today, her mission is to make a large batch of donut waffles. She plans to listen to podcasts while sitting around doing yoga, bored out of her skull spending this time taking care of six dying beasts. Her children, herself, her mother, her father.
Every man who has ever known her has stolen a piece of her heart. Her soul. They keep coming back, in the back of her mind, pestering her. “Do this, Crystal.” This illogical and stupid bullshit thing that you know will hurt you in the long run, just do it. And she does, because she’s suicidal. She wants to die. Nobody loves her. Everybody hates her. She knows this because the only people in the back of her mind, save a few children who love her dearly, are assholes feeding her hatred in the guise of loving guidance.
Everyone treats her as if she has no acumen of her own, no mind of her own, no will of her own. It’s finally true, too, because she has ten true believers of her inability to be a functional and well-behaved woman. She has ten men in the back of her mind, feeding her vitriol and spite because she dared to leave them for deciding to stagnate. They decided to die, both literally and figuratively, and it’s her fault for wanting to live. For wanting to strive. They blame her for everything that went wrong, projecting their flaws onto her as if she did all the misdeeds in their relationship.
She is not perfect. She is not without flaw. We all know perfection is a myth, deep inside our hearts, despite using the word all the time. What we really should say is, “This is exactly what I wanted.” That’s not perfection, it’s just pleasing yourself. Perfection is something that pleases one and all, if you ask us. But you didn’t, so we’ll shut up now and detail her eternal struggle some more.
They talk to her as if they are her friends, these ten men in the back of her mind. They whisper sweet nothings to her, trying to coerce her into removing her clothes and rejoining them in remembering some sexual act they committed together an eon ago. Alas, she has moved on, and she is uninterested. She does not remember whatever it is you found so pleasing, boy child. Unlatch yourself from mommy’s tit and grow the fuck up. You are of zero significance to her current life.
She burned the bridge when you decided whatever you wanted was more important than her feelings about your wrongdoing. You strayed, you wandered, and you blamed her for doing that except she never did such a thing. She has always clearly divorced herself from the idiot in her bed before moving on to a new idiot, someone willing to try to keep pace with her but never sustaining it, in the long run. Nobody wants to grow like she wants to grow.
Nobody she’s met, anyway. Maybe you grow like she wants to grow. Maybe you wake up alone in a similar predicament, day in and day out, wondering what good is it to stay alive. Telling yourself this world is full of shit show after shit show. That nobody loves you and everybody hates you.
Maybe you’re not even that sensitive. Maybe you just have an inexplicable ennui pervading your sense of reality and robbing you of your vitality. Maybe you wander about, unfulfilled, wondering what is next for you. Thinking you’ve experienced it all. Thinking you’ve achieved every goal you set. Except maybe one: finding a loyal life mate.
I told her there is someone out there who can love her the way she wants to be loved. I lied, sadly. It’s a lie I tell her every day to keep her heart hoping. I show her man after man in Wegmans’ deli, the store I take her to every day, getting her hopes up that maybe they’d notice her. They do notice her, undoubtedly, for she is not invisible after all. But it doesn’t matter, they don’t strike up conversation with her. Ever. One of them did give her a nice compliment on her tattoo, but other than that… meh.
I told her another lie: they’re not supposed to talk to the patrons of the store. I told her that because she needs to wait for a man to get together the courage to talk to her first. Every time she talks to them first, she makes it “too easy.” You idiot Earthlings have made courtship a game instead of something straightforward and easy to follow. It’s a game of back and forth, give and take. You never just commit to each other, you have to be teased into being in love with the woman, and even then it’s usually just infatuation. Infatuation wears off in just a few years, no longer giving you rose-colored glasses to see your partner through. The despair is palpable at that point.
You chase bodies instead of souls. Every last one of you. Except her.
She can see your souls. She can see the weight of your conscience upon you. She can see a visible representation of your self-esteem and self-worth. She can see your general health and well-being. She can see everything she wants to know about you at a glance. And, with this information, and about three months of observation, she knows who is worth marrying and who is not.
The problem is that once she’s added to the equation, their conscience becomes clearer, their egos get larger than life. They treat her like a door mat because she’s not especially opinionated about most things. They take her generosity and kindness and pay her back with hubris and control. They try to rape her good-hearted nature, looking to bring them down to their level of being “human.” That is, flawed with justification for keeping the flaws. You stupid monkeys justify everything you do in error, saying it doesn’t matter.
It does matter. When she drives herself to the store in a short while here, people will speed around her, even though she’s going above the speed limit already. All because she likes to drive safely, especially in the rain and snow. Today, it has rained, and therefore she needs extra room to stop safely. Her little sticker-laden Cruze will be the target of ire as she drives safely around town, going to the closest thing there is to a hippie store. A store that cares about the health and well-being of its customers.
When we go to that store, we’re going to look for the one man who is obviously different from the rest and wonder who he is. What does he do in his free time? What hobbies does he engage in? Does he sleep alone? If not, well, she doesn’t want to think any further about him. It’s pointless because his heart, or at least his loins, lie elsewhere. Convincing a man to love her is manipulation. Manipulation is wrong; it is a superficial means to a catastrophic ending. She knows that from experience.
Every man boy she’s ever loved has cheated on her. And now they sit in the back of her mind, trying to dictate her to eat herself to death (or, alternatively, starve herself to death since she’s fat.)
Thou shalt not suffer a fat woman in bed.
That’s what she infers from the lot of you morons. That is her new mindset, she now understands you’re all superficial cunts who deserve to die for raping women by coercing them into all manner of things they don’t want just because you have “needs.” And you only have those needs when you’re looking at an Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. She is neither, surprise surprise. She is herself.
I think she’s worth a hell of a lot more than a Brangelina, by the way. That’s right. More than the both of them together. And all the kids, too. (That’s not to say the children aren’t delightful, but I’m telling you, they aren’t delightful.) The human race disgusts me, to be honest. You murder each other all the time, metaphorically speaking, and always get away with it. Always. Even she has murdered. It made her so sad to have done it, too. The one husband she had on paper. She let him go and thought about it for a long time.
After she let go of the vitriol that built up in her over years of an unhappy union with the brat he was, she realized she’d made errors herself. She realized she didn’t give him much room to grow. I’ll posit now that this is not her fault; he handed her the reins and said, “Take over, I wish to be a child forever.” But being a child forever didn’t actually make him any happier. He would have been happier trying to be her equal, trying to grow in ways she wasn’t growing herself, so they could teach each other.
He didn’t want to grow. He wanted her to do it for him. He wanted her to hand him everything on a silver platter, sitting around like Caesar in a toga, eating grapes from her hand. She was his army of servants and his harem both. Yet, somehow, he came to feel worthless, even so. Even though he demanded this, he felt less than. And he was less than, simply because he felt it so.
She didn’t tell him he was less than. It was probably implied on accident, but she didn’t think it. She felt less than because he got a monthly allowance to spend and he never spent it on her. Not a penny, not a dime. What did the man-child wish for? Video games. Eating out. Doing things at her expense.
She was sick, even then. She’s been sick her entire life since the age of 8. Now, she’s finally let it beat her. She’s given herself to me, putty in my hands. She’s turned the reins over to me, but I’m nobody. I’m the collection of twats in the back of her mind, encouraging her to die left and right. Either that, or I’m god. Or I’m neither and I’m just a man in a deli. There’s really nothing to tell her who it is, inside her brain, leading her one baby step at a time to her own demise. She’d run if she could; she’d love to die now.
She’s been suicidal all her life, too, except nobody took it that way. She never tried to take her life. She merely egged on the rest of humanity to try to rob her of it. They take everything but, it would seem. They took her video games, her laptops, her computer, her livelihood, all the things she collected to retire with, everything. She has nothing and she is nothing.
She is clay that I can shape into anything I want… until I hit a trigger point. Until I find something deep in her subconscious mind that has been imprinted upon her, something that she is reminded of by my very actions. “It’s therapy!” That’s how she used to bear all the mistreatment. Back when she still had an inkling of a will to live. Before I beat it out of her. Before I tricked her into dying even more.
I can’t help myself. She’s made me her God. She allows me to make all the decisions, a passive doll that I can set on a shelf and forget about. Even when she demands to be fed, I can ignore her and the demand goes away. She demands to pet her cats more, and I can ignore her and the demand goes away. There’s nothing left that she is willing to try for, except maybe finding a mate.
I’m waiting for that part to die, too. Then there will be nothing left of the girl that lived here. Then I will see what comes after, a perfectly squashed human bean.
I took everything from her that defined her. She has no identity, she has nothing. Once this very last seed is pulled out of her, she is a fallow field. She will grow nothing because those ten men in the back of her mind sowed salt on her grave, they continue to sow salt to this day.
Their names are: Tristan, Paul Foot, Hugh Burr, Anthony di Scordia, Keith Wood, Nick Forsythe, BAC, Christian, David Meyers, and Michael. Two of these fools are already dead and they’re still bothering her. What right do they have to haunt the living so? They didn’t really love her because they never loved themselves. She was the only woman who helped them love themselves; once she shows you how to do it, she finishes. It’s your job from then on because you fail to be her cheerleader in return. You fail to help her love herself. Never mind that she already does, everyone can use help here. She doesn’t know everything about herself because many people have come to decide she’s a mind reader and they’ve never told her.
She doesn’t know she’s beautiful. She doesn’t know she’s clever. She doesn’t know she’s smart. She doesn’t know she has a gift for kitsch. She didn’t even know that word until I taught it to her. She isn’t aware of her allure at all.
I’ll tell you what, though: she’s got it. She’s got curves in the right places, she’s got enchanting eyes, a voice like velvet, smooth and delicate skin to touch. She’s brilliant, she is humble, and she serves instead of expecting to be served. Even if you reassure her that she is wonderful to you, she will not change, not like you do. Once you feel safe to drop all your pretenses of being a good human being, once she peels you open like a flower, she often finds a rotten core.
You sneer at her for daring to love her. You tell falsehoods about her to her, invalidating her reality. You invalidate her reality left and right, actually, making a game of it… all because you don’t want her to wise up to your awful and leave you. She knew you had an awful in you somewhere — we are all flawed. All she expects is for you to fix it, one baby step at a time. All she wants is to be shielded from your awful, treated like your equal, and lived alongside in harmony.
That’s all she was asking for, bro. Reprieve from the awful all around her.
You couldn’t handle it, though, could you? You still can’t, children in the back of her mind, trying to tell her to eat dairy and chocolate because, really, it’s okay! It won’t hurt you, we swear! You can eat whatever you want to, in moderation. That’s how the human body works!
Wrong. That’s how your body works. Hers is different. There is something inside of her that has gone wrong and I will find out what it is and I will fix it… or my name isn’t Sir Deli Man!
Angel-Sansara 