Darkest mirror, yes, I still miss her

I’m not calling names or pointing fingers. Honestly, I know very damn clearly that all of us have narcissistic traits. Every one of us.

This article helped me come to terms with still missing her now and then, my Stardust. Because in her shined the things I loved most about myself.

As much as I recognize the toxic cycles we became trapped in, I also have many wonderful memories of the time we had. I still love her, even if I can’t be with her. I’m coming to terms with that.

Even better, I love me MORE. Never again will I risk everything, including my life, for love. Because a healthy love would NEVER ask me to do that, no matter how good it felt.

From the article:

“Narcissists are our darkest mirror.

Whatever you most long for, whatever you most seek, whatever you truly are, the narcissist can see it. They use this understanding to manufacture feelings in you, to torment and play with you. Whether they do it out of jealously and lack (all narcs are empty), for the challenge associated with manipulating someone talented/empathic/special/vulnerable, or out of sheer boredom, narcissists can only reflect what’s already there.

Loving and losing a narcissist can be an anhilation event. When he’s no longer there to show us our reflection, it can feel like he took every little piece of us with him. But those pieces were there before the narcissist came along.

Narcissistic relationships offer us the gift of acknowledgement. Reinforcement of our truest and highest self. Whenever I missed my ex, I paused to reflect back on the aspects I most longed for, tracing the contours of his false personality, finding that all originates within me.

I became, for the first time, self-actualized and deeply happy.”

https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-stop-missing-a-narcissist/answers/106415310

She emulated the things I loved most about myself. That’s why she was so perfect. Even when she wasn’t. And I don’t believe she did it all to manipulate me. She truly believed her love was true as well. Until the end. Then there definitely were things said and done that weren’t based in love, but rather were based in fear. If I’d not been so blinded and wanted so very hard to believe then we never would have gotten as far as we did.

I won’t worship the ground someone walks on again. Never. I should be worshiping my own feet on the path meant for me. I’m learning, slowly, that the traits that draw me most to someone are the things I love most about me.

Day by day, I’m learning.

I Don’t Pack For You

It waits in the drawer till morning, 

I feel it, watching me, through the wood as if it were a window,

This alien piece of anatomy with no soul. 

I can feel it throb, hidden away, 

It’s attached, though it isn’t, 

Roots deep inside 

My hips saddled with femininity I want to slice off, 

They weigh me down without my consent. 

A gift unbidden from my mothers before, 

They squeeze my stomach, 

These hips that carry me, 

And I can’t 

Step forward

Any more

When they call the wrong name.

I didn’t agree to be gagged under the surface of an ocean so deep 

We all drown in it.

Let this me I was bleed to death with them, 

Let those hips 

And breasts 

Fall.

As they slap the ground around me,

Wet birthing, and heat, sticking to my legs, let them go.

And as I tucked the piece 

Between my thighs 

For the first time, 

I heard my skin slough away

And my fingers moved tapping on the sides of this cave within me,

Deep echoes of a human born

Again, yet

The way I was supposed to be.

No, I don’t strap for you. 

I don’t pack to make you squirm, 

I pack because without feeling whole I’m the one squirming, 

Living a skin that never felt right, 

Living a lie that always was too tight, 

And you laugh because my eyes can’t stop looking at that drawer.

As I will that latex piece to me with my screaming skin, 

And still you’re too blind to see 

What has always been.

I’m no longer just a writer…

I’m now an author, and floating high with the wisps of cloud in front of the setting sun…I’ve waited my entire life for this moment.

The art is my own, painted at the beginning of the quarantine starting in the area, which makes it even more special.

Thank you, Victoria, for the push and encouragement, as well as guidance. This is a day I’ll remember.

Barbed girl

I started this while still living in Idaho with my wifey. Before I left my future and everything else we were building. Leaving behind that anchoring thought, leaving her, I never wanted. Until I realized that I was making a choice between being near my son as he grew into manhood and being with someone who never trusted me and never would.

I made the right choice, even if it’s the most excruciating experience I’ve endured. I made the right choice for him, even if the narrows I’ve been wading through for six months threaten to drown me every damn day without a break.

I knew this was a love I wouldn’t recover from.

Every day I repeat my mantra and hope it will take root deep behind my sternum, and I’ll be able to breathe again.

“Love without trust is control.”

In the meantime, I’ll paint and write and not waste another moment with my son. My sun. The gentlest slender heart-on-spindly-legs I’ve ever encountered.

And meanwhile I’ll be a barbed girl, wandering amongst the cacti, because they know my cries for relief, sweating this love out of my pores in the Texas sun. Untouchable. Safe.

Sanguine skies

We laid there

In a dream I didn’t want to wake from so

I closed my eyes

And imagined your hand floating above me,

A sea of sharp sunlight stabbing

Between your fingers and

The sanguine skies reflected the sun in your blood

Until my eyes shone red with

Love for you, this moment

The desert your breath breathing over sands

That whisper no future or past but the

Power of this moment

Now and now I’m crying salt in the sand on

My cheeks

Because you me here now too salty sweet bitter

When we touch

The skies smile red because how many times

Our hearts bled, apart, yet the streams finally

Met in the middle

And I wake, crying my eyes back to sleep,

Because when I exhale I smell you

Deep inside me.

Candy

Image: @anya_panchenko

Strangers call me “sweetie”

It’s funny how these blues can mask and hide

All the ugly that lies beneath.

This smile, I don’t flash it to be kind….

It appears when I think about what I want to do to you,

The marks I want to leave behind, prints in your skin

Left in the wake of greed and lust, and maybe a sprinkling of anger.

I grin because you underestimate me

And I can picture the shock and dismay in your eyes

When you at last have a grasp 

Of how un-sweet I truly can be.

Take your lollipop

And shove it.

(Written December 31, 2011)

Because You Believed

August 10, 2011

“Because You Believed In Me”

Saw this today on a cheesy record at work

As I swept the floor,

Gliding between the stacks of books

Breathing their dust and previous lovers.

Their stories every day are the very air I breathe.

Perhaps it’s some of why writing has been impossible lately.

Too many stories.

Too much to tell, to say

And processing, yes, helps, but takes time.

But as this day has rolled on, as they do, 

All I can think of is 

“Because You Believed In Me”

I burn and my eyes can’t help but weep as I realize

There is not only one person I could write this about.

You have always been the champion

For someone who lost

LOST the two who most loved her in one blow,

This is a revelation.

Too long have I relived my past year, 

Husband and almost best friend leaving me for each other,

Hateful things said when before was nothing but devoted adoration.

What kind of person drives someone so close irrevocably far away?

How could I not question what sort of creature I had become?

Loss this year has been my constant companion.

Not just of the two of them, but also of myself. 

I claim it back now. Who tries to tear me away again is a sadistic fool.

Owning this, all of it, warped me into what should have always been.

Here is a being who has something….something her world craves

Something her people need.

It’s not simply because you believed.

It is because finally I do too.

And those floors I swept while sighing and weeping over an old record album title

Have never been brighter.

I am the skies before the rain

I am the skies before the rain, sticky sweet as an unexpected kiss,

I cling to you like sweat on skin, hugging you close with breath hot, my teeth on the back of your neck, my nails deep inside you.

I am the anticipation of wet earth, the smell that makes your eyes close in inhalation, the first drops on always dry land.

You drink me up like a woman who has been ravenous for days, your parched heart remembering its beat, and how it once thrummed for only me.

The wind knows your name, rustling in trees’ leaves crying for you, remembering the thirst you felt under those burning skies.

I am the woman you dreamed of years ago when you ached for the touch of female skin, my curves wind like a river in a canyon you get lost in,

Lick my map skin and find your way home.

Leave me a trail of crumbs, line them slowly and deliberately up the inside of my legs, slick my clit with your nudges,

Stop my breathing with your thighs, wrapped around mine, tightly pressed,

Make my pussy a slick pillow stuffed with blood pulsing in time with our hearts,

Suffocate my need with your body, rip into the gaping hole inside of us, shred my skin with the agony of the softest part of you.

Love me the way you did when you dreamed me into being, kissing tenderness into the chasms we’ve become.

Petrichor

I wake among your roots,

Turning my head to where your skin breaks the soil,

Nestling my lips deeper,

Gritty kisses in the morning.

Biting back the gristled edges of your bark,

To reach inside you, where I breathe

and breathe

and breathe,

Pulling you into my lungs, where the silence waits,

And my heart stirs, sluggish, damp, slow and sticky.

A chrysalis wet and heavy, melted forms inside,

Coming back together an alien moth.

I beat the moon with my wings,

And it’s raining inside me,

As I rot into you.

My bones become yours,

You smell like home.