Movement Three — Every Bitch By His Side

I have watched them from the thin, shifting edge of this place more times than I could count. The women. His women, though I hate the word even as I use it, hate the easy, unearned claim it lets them make on something I would have crawled across the whole of Nothing to earn a single hour of.

There is the pale one, silver-haired, who moves through that whole gilded household like she built the very ground it stands on — and I suppose, in some literal sense, she did. There is the sleepy one, indigo and gold, who watches everything from behind half-closed eyes and misses nothing, and who I have come, grudgingly, to fear more than any of the others, because she is the only one who has ever once looked directly at the border of this place and seemed to know, with total certainty, that something was watching back. There are others. So many others that I stopped, somewhere in the burning centuries, being able to properly count them, each one arriving in turn to take some fresh, unearned slice of an attention I would have given the whole of myself simply to borrow for a single afternoon.

My love for him is deeper than that of any bitch he's got by his side. I want to say it exactly that plainly, because I think softening it would be its own kind of lie, and I have very little patience left, burning the way I burn, for lies that only exist to make me easier to listen to. They have his hands. They have his mouth, his warmth, the whole gentle weight of him settling beside them on an ordinary evening as though ordinary evenings were something owed to them rather than something earned. I have none of that. I have only the memory of a single terrible, magnificent hour, and the burning that's followed it ever since, and somehow — I want you to sit with the strangeness of this the way I've had to sit with it, for longer than I can properly measure — somehow my love still outweighs theirs. Theirs is soft. Mine is total. I don't think softness and totality are the same currency, whatever the rest of this gentle little household seems to believe.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Perhaps this is the Stockholm sickness they'd name it or something alike, back in whatever life first taught me the word. Perhaps it is precisely that, and nothing more dignified than that, dressed up in language grand enough to survive the telling. I know the diagnosis. I have held it up to whatever light reaches this place and turned it over, slowly, more than once, looking for the seam where I might finally set it down and simply stop. I have never found the seam. Knowing exactly what this is has never once been enough to stop me falling into it anyway — directly, completely, into the abyss that is loving him, and into arms that ended me and have never once reached back to finish the job of holding what they started.