Loving Sugar

FOREWORD

This is just some insight into the main character, you can skip this if you'd like.
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For a majority of my childhood I watched my mother be used by weak minded men. Beaten out of anger and jealousy, controlled and manipulated and torn down to a weak woman. Time after time I would watch as men came into our lives used and abused a good woman and left like clockwork.

It was always a beautiful beginning, flowers and gifts, compromising and understanding, until the first fight when soft eyes turned red with anger and jealousy. Hands would reach out and I would hear the unforgiving swing of a hand making contact or hands squeezing a loud voice into a weak sound. Rumbling of voices and raw emotions into screaming and slamming of doors and innocent objects being smashed into walls.

A voice that sounds familiar but full of rage and emotion flowed into my young ears and I'll never forget the slanderous words degrading a woman who only submitted to the rage in fear of being alone.

I never questioned my mother. She made her own decisions and I always kept my mouth shut to avoid the conflict that came with questioning an abused woman.

A decade and a half into my life and I heard my mother be degraded at every turn. The guilty weak man always placed the blame on his partner, to subject the weaker more forgiving partner to the scrutiny of questions and skepticism. Then, plays the saint for forgiving them for their unfaithfulness, their broken trust repaired with the lies of too many chances.

Yet my mother kept forgiving and going back to the blissful piece of hell. She always said that when it was good, it was really good, and when it was bad....

I have a blurred vision of love. What was it? How did it make you blindly ignorant? Was love a downward spiraling rollercoaster waiting for impact? Did physical expression show love? Was abuse an "I love you?"

Was love dunking your head underwater and screaming to deaf ears? Was love forcing your lungs to regulate water instead of air to keep the problems at bay? Was love letting someone else tell you how to love them? Was love staying with someone until they ultimately broke you into submission?

What is love? Who can clearly tell me the definition of love? How do you know what love is? Why can't schools teach us how to love somebody? Who invented love? Where does the word come from? Who was the first person to say "I love you" to another person? Who was the first person to slam their hand into the face of someone they loved under the pretense that their dominance showed love?

If I hit you harder I love you more. If I squeeze your throat diminishing your voice it's only because I want you to hear me say I love you. If I call you ugly it's so the other men won't look at you. If I didn't love you I wouldn't have hit you. So close your mouth, sit down and listen to what I have to say and don't look anywhere else.

I love you, and means the world to you to hear the words part my lips. As if three words were going to stop the next blow, make them hurt any less. Three words to make you feel beautiful, three words to make you forgive, three words to tear your world apart. Three worlds to change your life yet, we know nothing about love.

For example, what is the difference between healthy and unhealthy love? A thin line of trust? Trust between two people not to hurt each other? The ability to put others interests before yours? The trust that if you fall the other person will catch you? To care for someone with no regard to your own well being? If love is the opposite of abuse why is it so often forgiven for love? Why is it associated with love? Why is something so indescribable attached to something so pure?

Love is a beautiful beating to unrealistic expectations.

Love is a drug that blinds your senses and erases lessons you've learned before. A blindfold to the outside world, a hallucinogenic drug for happy endings. A drug, some of us have enough to get by another day or two. Others have withdrawals and wean off of it to fix ourselves and the very few who have enough overdose their life with happiness.

Those who rely on it kneel over and blind themselves to the truth. The beauty in which they call love tears them down into people they do not recognize. Yet everyone wants love, everyone wants to be loved, everyone wants to be in love.

Love. L. O. V. E. A four letter word. What is it? How do you know you're in love? How do you know you love something? How is it possible to give someone your all and expect them not to let you down. Foolishness is what it's called. Yet a man can be irresponsible with it and just be called a man, a woman called derogatory terms to make her feel bad for only acting on what she's seen done before.

Men are just as responsible as women are in keeping a relationship together. For not stepping out on a woman, for keeping the flame alive. When a woman is unhappy she is told to try harder in the relationship, to try to fix what's wrong. When a man is unhappy it's the woman's fault. It's the woman's fault for not giving the man what he needed, what he wanted, for not looking the way he wanted to her to look. The double standard of life. Where each generation of men act like boys and treat women like objects, and women only do what they have seen done in the past and the cycle restarts with their children. There is no such thing as real relationships anymore.

I never thought I'd fall in love. I never thought that I'd experience what being in love is. I never gave thought to what it would be like because I did not want it. Yet, fate has a sick way of playing with you, a way of showing you that it does not care what you want, it's going to give you what you need.

I became an addict. I got a small taste of the drug and overdosed. I did everything I never wanted to do, everything I just told you I did not understand, I ended up doing. I understand now why and how love makes you do things. I fell in love with a woman and lost myself in loving her. I fell in love with Sugar.