The Deterrent

I'm not sure why this happens again and again, but once again I have made myself subject to cardiac pain. You think I'd have learned by now to be more cautious, more prudent, more sensible, or at least more skeptical. But I guess I've genetically inherited my father's romanticism, which includes but is not limited to a hundred red roses and the whole nine yards. Damn. As much as I pride myself on being a strong, independent individual, I find that I leave myself wide open for others to play with throwing knives aimed at my heart. And to no degree are these marksmen ill-intentioned. They just inadvertently seem to be blind and deaf to my futile attempts to talk them down from the violent sport. And much to my chagrin, my first instinct is to not find fault with the cloth that covers their eyes or the cotton stuffed in their ears, but rather to blame myself for not shouting in more earnest or for allowing myself to take the post as a target in the first place. I know better than to find myself culpable for the feelings of someone else. I do. Sadly, I am not predominantly a rational animal. I'm a sentient being, one who feels more strongly than she can rationalize.

So I've taken all of this grief, the disappointment, the pain and turned it into the most vile poison. Hate. Not for the sport, not for the marksmen. For myself. I feel ugly as though I've suddenly seen that I am not the fair lady but rather the wizened hag in the optical illusion. As though all this time, I've eluded myself to see the beauty when everyone else saw the crudeness. So I've taken up the mirror that magnified the surface of my skin twenty fold and have started picking. And picking. And picking. I've gazed into the pores of my skin, the dark pits of disdain, and at the fine hairs of my limbs that appear as insidious tendrils of shame. I prod and jab at my figure composed of infantile flesh and grimace. But all this hate directed outwards cannot hold a candle to the hate I feel for the very blood that runs through my veins and the very anatomy that holds me up to be the homo sapien that I am. Everything that is of my essence is wretched. Everything I touch seems to suddenly take life and run away from the thing it last touched. I cannot make anyone stay. Not my father and not him.