Theme Park at its Darkest

Final

I had met her ex. He was the ugliest man I had ever seen in my life.

After I had called her on the phone early on, he had heard the message and gone into my place of work to look for me. After some phone tag via SMS, I agreed to meet him at a restaurant later that night.

Granted, he had a face that would scare the blanket off your bed, but it was more than that. Sunken eyes, jaundiced skin, jailhouse tattoos and a kind of filthy look, like he had a kind of ingrained dirt trapped in the folds of his skin from all the things he’d done. Even the whites of his eyes were stained.

He threatened me, and I accepted his invitation to sort it out on the footpath outside. Once we stood eye to eye, he declined.

After the girl and I had begun seeing each other, he came over to see her while she was cleaning out the flat they had shared together. He held her down and attempted to break her nose in front of their two-year-old daughter.

Our relationship began well, but she soon began to display a ferocious temper. This one was different to the lawyer. While I wasn’t always sure of the precise trigger with the lawyer, I knew when I’d pulled it. The beauty used to come home in a terrible mood and then it would be on.

Her style was different to the lawyer, also. While the lawyer just flew into a blind, hysterical rage, it felt as if this woman was trying to draw me into a ritual of some kind, where we each stood in for the other’s ghosts.

It always felt like the first few insults were gambits, like invitations to join a game.

Our relationship was brief. We went out for three great weeks followed by a terrible fourth, characterized by intense hostility on her part. I tried to talk her around, but she wouldn’t come; she wanted to hold onto the ruction for some reason I couldn’t figure out.

Finally, she tried to close the gap by trying to incite me to beat someone up that had made advances toward her. In this case, it was her younger sister’s boyfriend. I broke up with her.

***

I feel like I have the mark of Cain on me and I just can’t rub it off, but when I look in the mirror, all I see is my father’s face, staring back at me. I am scared of harming those girls, sure, but most of all, I am scared to fulfill the prophecy.

I am in the final act of the play and am terrified that I am the curse. I don’t want to discover the curse is actually me.

Most of the time, I feel alright about the things I have written here, but then, I almost never talk about it. The only people I discuss it with are other women, almost exclusively lovers.

Maybe I discuss it with them because they are the ones who can judge me, and I genuinely care what they think.

Until I have a child, anyway, to whom I will have to concede the ultimate authority.

This entry was posted on September 10, 2017 at 9:31 am and is filed under Morbid Love, Real Men, violence against women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.