Gasoline

Gasoline fumes and bleeding gums, that is what I am made of tonight. You say I let their shadows tower over you, you say I invoke their name to hide in my fears. You say I cast you down and keep you there on the ground eating slop and shit like something beneath me. You don't know the half of it.

Have you ever seen footage of Buddhist monks that set themselves ablaze to protest something they think is unjust? You want to look away, you want to say you just can't comprehend it, it's too terrible. You want to look away, but you can't. You stay staring, pupils constricting in fear while their body is bathed in first brilliant yellow, then goldenrod, and finally blood orange flames. You watch down to the last moment, until the flames lap at nothing but an indistinguishable pile of burning; with plumes of putrid thick black smoke bellowing away from it. The ultimate sacrifice and service to others.

If that is what it would take to prove to you that I am not your enemy I would do it in a heartbeat.

I would sit calmly, looking you right in the eye as I lit the match and felt the oppressive heat spread all over me. I would sit there silently chanting YOUR name, the LAST NAME I would utter until I could no longer tap my consciousness. I want you to know, not a SINGLE name of theirs would cross my mind, only you, only ever you. And as my delicate ashes rose in the air with the smoke, I would send you every good blessing for love and happiness and warmth. Such is the depth of my devotion to you.

If there was a way to uncloud your vision and shock you awake I would do it. If there was a way for me to let you try on my vision for a day, to wear my skin, to feel what I feel, I would gladly do it, just so you would know that I NEVER saw you as beneath me. You are NOT my equal, NOT my better, NOT my pupil, NOT my savior. You are my comrade, but we are cut from different clothes. You are kismet, a reflection of pieces of my soul, but put together in a way so inexplicably beautiful I would never have had the foresight to put you together that way had I fashioned you myself.

I have walked these paths before you, in different shoes long cast away. This does not make me an expert, some monolithic dark god to be feared and obeyed. It makes me experienced, it makes me tired, worn, and busted. It makes me used, and world weary, and has sharpened some of my senses to dagger points. But make no mistake, I don't see you below me, and I don't see you behind me. Yours is own your own path. What you do with it is YOUR will alone. I cannot change you, to think otherwise is sheer madness. But more to the point, I wouldn't try, I wouldn't dare.

I love you because I love you, warts and all. I stay with you because I see in you the unspoken promise of knowing with a kind of calm certainty that you are the one I am meant to spend my nights and days with. I whether this lonely ragged time now, to benefit all the more from the exhilaration of the sharp sweetness of your return. I thought you knew, I love you, I love YOU, not them. I thought you knew, I want YOU, haven't I said that so MANY times? Haven't I begged and pleaded for this enough? Haven't I walked on hot coals and crawled across cut glass? Shall I give you another demonstration?

Where have my matches gone to now?

I was mistaken...Apparently I've just been using you all along to fulfill some twisted time traveling experiment. Apparently I'm just trying to heal my old scar tissue by inflicting some onto your skin. Apparently...

You take the helpful things I say and twist them into barb wire coated in acid, something caustic and painful; something you need protecting from. You take everything I ask of you and make it an impossible menial task. Every well meaning piece of advice is turned into a sharp criticism. And every honest critique is turned into an attack on your character. Don't you know by now? I tell you these things to help you. I'm trying to help you damn it. But I always get the bad apples as my bedfellows. Insecurities and fears are thrust into my apple cart, obscuring the site of me standing right there next to it, still ALWAYS trying to dig out the good ones and shine them to a brilliant slick for you.

It's a bittersweet affair being your loved one. I'm always the lousy flint eyed beast growling down your neck, always the tyrant demanding too many things from you, always burying you under the weight of some perfectionist ideal. If that is all I am, If that is all I have become then so be it. If that is what you need now, I'll be your villianess AGAIN.

But just ask yourself for a second, who are you rebelling against? Is it really ME you need to take a stand against? Is it really ME you need to assert your independence towards? How could I possibly be challenging your independence?? Me? Really???

Wasn't I the one who is always trying to help you get to that place of solvency? Aren't I the one who is always encouraging you to do more? With a steady firm certainty I have told you: I know you can do it. I know you can do ANYTHING you put your mind and heart to. Who told you to look inside yourself and stop doing only what was comfortable? Who showed up 2 years ago and starting rattling the rusted cage you kept yourself in, encouraging you to taste that long forbidden freedom running wild on your tongue? That wasn't me. I swear that wasn't me. When did I become what you needed to compete against? When did I stop being the person who came to your bedside when you were sick, who held you when you needed to cry, who helped you plant your feet firmly when the waves crashed harder against you standing there with you?

I am swilling the gasoline around in the can it makes a slight tinny sloshing sound. It is half full and heavy, so heavy. I am raising the can above me and pouring in a long bending line of pink tinted fluid gravity. It is running down my face as I hold my breath. No matter, the fumes make their way in through my ravaged nostrils and my eyes burn. My skin tingles and chafes violently. I shiver from the cold, but my teeth do not chatter, my jaw is firmly set. My clothes sag with the burden of this accelerant. Let it be painful, let it last forever, I am begging for it. I am folding myself into the lotus position and as I bend the matchbook over itself to strike and send myself up in flames, I think of you.

Only you.