literature

The Wreck of Troy

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Out of the darkness comes illumination:  a flickering streetlight, sick fluorescence casting its glow across the wreckage of my being.  Bruises and black, dried blood stand out against the stark, white scar tissue, the raised lines like walls, dividing my skin into territories:  little broken countries in the aftermath of vicious civil war.  What the fuck was ever civil about war?  Helen of Troy must have felt like this, watching the city burn around her.  Powerless.  Men killed and died for her perfect body, but her mind, her soul, meant nothing.  Her heart was just a bloody piece of meat, to be ravenously consumed as the spoils of conquest.  Disgusting men licking their greasy, dripping fingers, and complaining when there isn't any more left to be had.

I gave you everything I'd promised, and you kept demanding more.  Demanding as if it were your right; as if merely wanting had made it yours.  You lied to me and to yourself, believing you were hurting no one, but the lies, like any drug, could only carry you so far.  Eventually the lies caught up, and your descent into paranoid withdrawal threatened to tear the very fabric of both our lives.  I had to let you go, to cut the ties that bound us before they dragged me down and strangled me to death.  Like Cassandra, I had seen the future, but I was not willing to become a martyr for it.

So here I am again.  Cast off, as I have been before, by others, when my usefulness to them ran out.  The fragile globe of your reality has shattered, leaving jagged shards embedded in my skin and lying everywhere around me.  Your lies, like used needles, surround me as well, threatening to infect me and destroy me if I do not handle them ever so gently, or avoid them entirely.

To live is to be in constant motion, so I must move through this environment, to the unknown future, lying beyond the illuminated circle of the now.  Past the broken glass and dirty needles, bare feet on the grimy, wet cement of unsoftened, unwelcoming reality.  There is no comfort to be found, no protection except for constant vigilance, never knowing where you'll have left another of your lies to be stepped upon.  My city has burned; the stones lie broken.  But I am not broken.  I place my feet, one step, and another:  I build new parapets of stone, new glittering sculptures of bronze and glass.  I build them stronger than before, and am more watchful of the guests I let inside.  I search for needles in their pockets and greedy hunger in their eyes - I ask them, bluntly, to their faces, if they've ever eaten another's heart.

One step, and another.  The bruises fade, the dried blood flakes and washes off.  The scars recede.  There will be others to overlay them, I am sure; there always are.  But my physical beauty was never worth the price you told me I had to pay, and my mind, my soul, remain.

In the future, there will still be love.
When a lie destroys the city of the gods, this is what remains.
© 2013 - 2024 StrangeChilde
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