the welt

it sits on me like a burn, sometimes I poke at the strange hull that is my skin's way of throwing up a tent over a hole in the ground to protect it from infection.

I know I shouldn't look anymore, and I look. I look for so many reasons. Sometimes it is, I wonder if he doing well? then it might be, I wonder if his photo has changed, next I might say, I want to see the man and the woman that fucked me up emotionally for too long and face them and say to their likeness, you didn't win. Sometimes I am scared that if she is gone from the picture he might come back to me.

I looked today and it was the first time I really spoke aloud, screamed at the screen, said mean, terrible, horrible things that no one would say unless provoked or angry, because sometimes I think it's bad to be angry. I am always trying to be nice that when I am mean, on purpose, intentionally nasty, it seems so harsh.

I hate that he still has that effect on me, that he can still incite my passion and rage and yet it has been over a year. I hate that I can't stop thinking about that image. For some reason the other one didn't enrage me, because he looked different, not the same, some face I had never seen before. This one, the newer one, she was ignoring him, he was holding a drink and the only one looking at the camera and he had those same beady eyes of terror, the tragic yoke of "I was dragged here by the woman I'm standing next to against my own desire to sit at home and get high and watch tv on the couch the way I do night after night."

This one is so familiar to me, the sight of him that way, that it was like I instantly relived all those moments of his behaving that way, like a fucking petulant child; I screamed out loud at the image. And I know this sounds fucked up, but in a way I was kind of mad at him for doing that again with some other girl he left me (not just any me, but me!) for. Because if he left me, it had better been worth it, and that face told me it wasn't worth it for him anymore. He was now doing to her what he did to me. And he pretended it was all my inducing, causing in him, that I forced him to be that way.

I had hoped that he was right and that by leaving me, he could be free and find what he really needed. That face showed me the discovery that he is the commonality and maybe I was right and in the right about so many things we argued over. But it is no victory if he is miserable.