"May everything terrible come back to you tenfold:" a note never sent

In you I put every hope and dream, every hopeless want and desire. Primeval promises of security and progeny, primordial whispers of love. You made me worry needlessly about dreams that would never come true, and you're in the habit of making up false truths, spoken with such sincere insincerity as to almost be believed. I banked on you, invested in you—hear the pennies clink into the porcelain pig. But you're a sociopathic over-groomed pig with that lilting Southern drawl, unworthy of investment, or of broken heartstrings.

How could you utter lies with an unflinching face unless you yourself believe such waste?? Many nights I wondered where you were, where you might've been, and most of all why you weren't with me. Love is for lovers, not for fair-weather fans. Last night—important, you thought, for fairly unimportant reasons—you left me in order to go divide up dishes and forks and spoons with your exwife, allegedly long-gone but still with kitchen wear in your drawers and cabinet? I've groveled for your attention, hoped even in dreams to see you, to touch your skin, to feel the softness of your eyebrows under my fingertips, to hold your hand while falling asleep. I once buried my face into the shirts that you hung in my closet, hoping to forever remember the scent of your skin. But the shirts reeked of mildew, like old sponges rotting in sinks. You, ...., offered me the world and all its trappings, with no intention of giving me even a scrap from your plate. While I was happy, you were happy to have me; but when my true self bled through I became a petty inconvenience and as worthless to you as a dried-up whore. You're now motherless and fatherless, and heartless above all. Your father was a fugitive, and there's bad blood on the ... family tree. You're as trustworthy as an unlicensed veterinarian, as truthful as a petty thief.

And though I've had my heart broken so many times before, and spent so many nights staring into the dirty puddle of solitude, last night was different. The camel's back snapped and it writhes grotesquely on the desert floor. To you, I've always been less important than crusty utensils, less valuable than chipped saucers and plates. Upon your leaving, I groaned with sadness and then I felt everything heal over with scabs of disappointment. But I realized, with the snap of the dromedary's back, that I'm was too extraordinary, too beautiful, and too remarkable to be treated like such penetrable tearful trash.

The choices we make are the beds we lay in. Or else, we'd all be sleeping in featherbeds with French pillows, telling lies and making impossible promises, drinking bad liquor and smoking on porches and being ruthless, unthinking, and cruel. Like you,...., drinking whiskey with ginger ale, insisting on three limes and extra ice. Like you overbidding at auctions, grinning the grin of the greedy and rich.

The sound of your voice make me think think of mildew and forks caked with hardened egg yolks. Never has a drawl sounded so vile.

May everything terrible come back to you tenfold,

"Anna"

date almost sent: 10.5.08