Malice

A story of pain and the shadows of a forest

By the bank of the river I found him. "Everything looks the same," I told him, "I couldn't find you." He didn't turn his head or move any of his limbs. I stopped to catch my breath and feel all of my bodily pains. He didn't realize how many circles of trees and identical ground he put me through while trying to find him and make it right again. I wanted to show him my anger, but I knew it wouldn't do any good, so I walked up to him and sat. "Do you want to tell me what's on your mind?" I asked him. "Everything." He said. It was always everything for him, even on a good day. "I know, and I know how you are. Sometimes for you everything only means one thing," I said. "Yeah," He murmured. Only someone trained within his life like I was could hear him and understand.

"Please come near me again." I softly pleaded to him, not knowing where this sudden stupidity came from in me. It would always turn out like this. He'd give the bare minimum of words and would withhold his true thoughts, while I would always give him outbursts of my affection to the point of no return. It continues: "I know you like being away and standing by yourself, and coming to places like this, but please, just come by me, be near me. Tell me what's wrong so I can help." I felt the ground soften as we sunk into a pause.

A silence filled with worthless noise. "I can't. I don't know how to talk about anything anymore, and it's just been getting worse. If you know me so well, then why did you come find me here?" He said.  It sounded as though it were simple and mapped out in his head, as he always used to play it off. But I knew nothing about him was ever simple. That's partially what's responsible for his beauty. The thing that was most captivating about him though, was that no one could ever have him. I was the only one who ever got close, and the one person he almost loved in a real way, but not quite.  "I came to find you because I know that I'm the last person who ever tolerates your lashing out anymore. You think you want to be alone, but reasonably you don't" I answered. 

"Reasonably? So now you're explaining reason to someone like me? Coming from you it sounds ridiculous." He wanted to hurt me, because he was hurting and his vanity stopped working long ago. "Just stop," I said, "If you don't want to talk, then really, don't talk. You don't have to try to hurt me. I'm here because you succeeded. I ran through this stupid forest just to find you, because you did hurt me."  "Okay then. Here I am, darling. And here we both are, while you don't know me very well at all. Especially not as well as you think you do." I didn't respond, as my heart was swallowing itself. He was using his own failed feelings, the broken pieces of shell he had, as weapons. He recognized how close he got to infinitely trusting someone, somebody like me, and he felt as though it were an internal failure.

He saw such trust as a blockage from all the things he wasn't afraid of. Everything to do with confidence in another person scared him away forever. That's why I knew better. I understood that making plans with him and giving him the responsibility to maintain a relationship killed him. So I didn't do anything of the kind, until then. Once I got near him and that terrible  body of water I realized that I took the last step to euthanasia. I did such a thing because I trusted him for whatever reason, I felt that he could never hurt me the way he'd been hurt because he would see it coming and protect me from it. But the very things I trusted him with frightened him to death and therefor broke his trust in me. 

He was the most stubborn, stupid soul I had ever known. But still the brightest and most desirable. I held onto him mentally as the sky got darker. Still we were there in the woods, by that same disgusting water-bed. I said nothing, I just waited, as I would be doing the same thing had I not been near him physically. He explained nothing and paid me no mind. I felt like a broken statue meant to be by water, eternally, filled with futility. But I was still there, holding myself out as a collective for his words. The darker it got the more insane I imagined he was, as I'd never known anyone to be like this. Completely obsessed with doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing at all. I wondered how blank and white his mind was, how black it was instead. But there was still so much good within him that no one could plainly see. It kept me at a lapse, and it made me just as insane as I thought he was.

There wasn't physical anything for what felt like a life. The crickets in the dark and in the reeds were telling stories about us, and they were telling me all over again how much I wanted him to be near. I fought them and slowly gave up on him. I wanted to get up and go home, and show him the same breed of ignorance he was pushing me away with. But as I began to move his hand shot toward mine and took hold. It was the most automatic thing I'd ever felt, and there was nothing but pleading in his fingers. "Why?" I screamed. "Why have I been waiting this long for you?" He said nothing, but used all of his force to pull me down onto the ground with him and into his arms."

I wanted to scream and shove my tears into his face, get my salt into his eyes and his hair, but I didn't even want to fight. His heartbeat was a little bird's, beating quickly and weakly. His arms and body and breath blew their poisonous fumes around me. The chemicals that always made me stay, but they weren't as torturous as all the words he ever gave me, and all the words he refused to let me have. "Why?" I kept screaming. He only held me more tightly, never would he say anything. All I could fathom was his masculinity and his miserable cunning. It instantly built cities inside of my brain and the noise was too much for me to be able to hear anything else.  

He was entirely frail but void of devotion, so tactile and empty of any intelligence other than how to survive, because everything else he taught himself to forget. He was my ghost and my other half. He was something that wasn't made of minerals or dust or cotton. He was nothing to me but the final piece, the most dangerous thing I would ever encounter.  He was my life, he was my death, he was the place in which  I would spend the rest of my days, and he was the person who would waste them all for as long as he could. These thoughts passed through me the entire night. 

He listened to my tears, and I like to imagine he compared them to the velocity of the river. I begged him for answers in the mud, and under the oil-black sky, in his arms, in his horrible hands. He gave me nothing, but I felt how much he needed me. He hated me for it, for believing, needing, loving, being mentally forced to breathe in someone like me. He truly was filled with hatred. It wasn't the same hatred that everyone else talked about. It was a hatred as pure as anyone has ever loved, and it was the first real thing he learned to feel for me, for anyone in his life, and it existed simply because he loved me but not in the right way. 

Reviews

[lee von cleef]

To be loved even by yourself ,brings comfort. Decomposition, the joy of learning to live with it.

[Scarlett-Helena]

Thank you for reading and reviewing this so nicely! :D