It had started out as something beautiful, a night like any other. Now it was in ruin. The candle, once lit to bathe the room in a quiet warmth, lay on its side in a pool of cooled wax. A dish rested by the wall, its thousand pieces finding a new home in the fibers of the carpet that led back to the overturned chair. It wasn't supposed to be this way; everything about this evening had been perfect. Almost everything. But now the bottle of wine had spilled, and the dark red that stained the white tablecloth bled in a trail that inched over to the edge and dripped on the floor. And then there was the yelling, still coherent in the aftermath to give away the scene.
"Forget it happened! It's my fault for thinking that all these years meant something!" James yelled, his voice wavering from its falsely brave tone. He turned away from me so that I wouldn't see him start to cry again. I loved him, and it should've made me want to give him comfort, but I wasn't myself in this situation. Instead, the way he became emotional only made the red cloud my eyes more, and I moved farther from being the man he knew.
"Yeah, it is your fault. Nobody forced you to move in here, and fuck you for thinking that I owe you anything, you son of a bitch!" I wasn't supposed to call him that. I loved him, more than anything, it was my job to protect him. But this was what I was, deep down—what I'd always been—and no matter how he had come into my life and saved me, it was what I'd forever be. An animal, dangerous and incapable of being tamed from a lifetime spent in the wild. I wished he would run far away from me, because no matter how I tried I couldn't remember how to calm this beautiful anger.
"When did I say that?" He sobbed, trying his hardest to get through to me despite the wall I'd thrown up to block him. That was the problem, the same demon we came back around to every time. I was afraid, just as I'd been since I first met him, and I didn't want to say these things. Yet it was out of my control, and my body forced me to so that it could protect itself and what it housed. Even though it'd almost been perfect, James had said the wrong thing, and the walls had begun to close in. The rising tide had swelled so I pushed back, automatically and in the only way I knew how. I turned venomous, made it about him, burned him before I could be burned.
"You don't think I see you, every fucking day? Walking around here, acting like you're better than me. But you're not! You're a pathetic fucking faggot, and I don't need you. You're only here to get me off, don't think for a second I won't throw your ass out on the street. You should be grateful, you'd have nothing if not for me!" Even I didn't know myself right then, and I wished that I could stop. This wasn't us, what our relationship was. No, we were so in love, and there was only beauty and grace. But this was the worst of times, the first instance that the beast inside had reared its ugly head.
But he still hadn't done anything wrong; how could he possibly know how scared I was? He'd spent the entire day making sure everything would be perfect for when he asked me to marry him, yet it hadn't gone the way he expected. No, instead he found himself staring into the eyes of a man he couldn't know—a man he didn't want to know—and he was afraid too. His entire face wrinkled up and he wept as he turned to run into the bathroom. I heard the lock click from where I was, and it made me even more irrational to see how much he vilified me. Or maybe I just didn't like that I could see my reflection in his tears.
Before I could stop myself I was at the door, pounding on it so hard that I thought I might break it down. I yelled at him more, said a few other awful things in an attempt to draw him back out. But nothing worked, and I could only hear the horrible way he cried on the other side. Surely he'd never thought things would turn out this way, that I could've twisted such a beautiful and perfect thing into what it was now. But he should've known, we'd been together long enough. What did he expect to happen when he tried to domesticate something as feral as me?
YOU ARE READING
God & Sinner
Spiritual"Don't you know that all things must bear the winter? To everything there is a season. There is no dawn before the dark, no life without death, no love without loss. These beautiful things are only made possible by that which is diseased and ugly." ...
