scribblechic

It seems only natural that the seeds of such unhappiness might produce a child of discontent. Embarrassment permeating each failure until resentment threaded itself into a vocabulary of disdain. It was a weaning of contempt that fed thoughts of malice between mother and child.

Such deficit was only exacerbated by the easy affability of another child, one that demanded little and gave freely. Such dichotomy between a single home might have balanced the inequality of love, but instead it informed a greed of blame and a luxury of defiance.

Home was little more than the hollow places of broken expectations, all sharp corners and empty manners.

Thank you to those who have afforded me the luxury of sounding out the shape of something new in complicated characters and fragmented storylines. Pieces of personal truth and creative license make for a colorful exercise in a well-loved pastime. 

Of the two he was most certainly less concerned by the passage of years. He had traded the youthful effervescence of his happiness for a burden of guilt decades previously. Marriage was meant to be a service of silence, a condition he would endure; it was a sacrifice of joy that he labored over with sloppy devotion. Trapped inside aches he could not escape, he was left to the nightmare of his days.

There was a time he might have chosen differently. A stretch of summer that played against the winter of his spirit, when he might have walked another truth; where for the briefest of occasions he was more father than husband. Clumsy in the novelty of his permission to play at a simpler experience of parenting without the demands of a more calculated performance of marriage. He would never be a good man, but he might have been a better father.

It was a  tarnished sense of duty that bound him to his penance; a visceral need to numb himself for the sin of a private wish.

–

There were pictures that hinted at another woman, perhaps once beautiful, cloaked deeply beneath the leathered skin of so many summers under a lazy sky. She liked to parade these photographs in defiance of age with the same postured sentiment she framed images of family she did not know.

Underneath the performance of exuberant cheer, there was a bitterness that chewed the words she spat from angry lips. Even in noisy demonstrations of generosity, you had only to look to the fleshy folds of exposed skin for the weight of extravagance hoarded to ward of the poverty of her spirit. It is the worst kind of prison that is built around greed. Lavish walls of solitude, fortified by false ideals.

–

Bound together by their secrets, they lumbered through the discomfort of old age leaning heavily on a crutch of self-righteous indignation. Blame and misery permeating whatever joy they might have once shared.

Intricate manipulations spun into a nonsense of fiction;

a dense narrative of false accusations and complete fabrications.

It is the remarkable my children know as normal;

the sensational that we experienced as unexceptional.

A practice of deception that demands

silence and breeds fear with a terrifying performance of harm.

Only, I’m not afraid – your threats no longer scare me.

I’m becoming more intentional in my reckless disregard for secrets

I am no longer bound by obligation to keep.

A web more unbelievable for its truth;

slowly unraveling into words.

For better for worse,

remember

I never promised not to tell.

Black widow on the wall,

I wonder if you’re scared at all.