A Quiet Exodus
A personal reflection on conditional affection, feeling measured, and learning to embrace solitude.
A return of one’s affection into a trapped transaction too soon to trust. He assumes what he wants is always meant to be taken. Paths are carved with the barest green lights to keep them in line so neither scrutiny nor the law can exact consequence. Because really, history is a mosaic of lessons where one tests his limits at another's expense, morality slips, and we learn where new restrictions are to be warranted, because man himself does not trust his kind to not run too far with what is wrong.
Therefore, I do not count on his accounting of my gestures, my time, or my capacity for interest to make things easy on honesty. Because I’ve watched eyes light to a drink becoming two, and catch gestures lurking of objective. Offer a sliver of power, and everything between him and me becomes his oyster. That is in all he can, but I cannot without raising disgust. The small illicit cruelties from somewhere between the embedded and chosen oblivion. The pain that justified some unnamed pleasure without a name. The cry of shame that wipes his past clean, until the tears dry in a moment's expectation of me. All while I try to predict when my crimes will exceed a threshold of empathy. Where will I be accepted, and what will brand me? As if I were only an ideal for inflating ego. A shape for conquest. A fit for structure. An angel meant to submit, filling his sinful gaps.
It doesn’t take long to find myself stumbling on eggshells, a dance between pleasing and preventing. Avoiding a slip on my words, in case the muse made of me becomes misleading. Afraid of my own truth because I know the danger in saying I don’t like you. In inadvertently proving incompatible with, or fatally confirming a predetermination I have yet to predict. In line of fire of the triggered. The depths of my hallows, explored curiously, dissolving into vacant space for assumption. The consequences of misunderstanding when understanding was never the goal. But I stand with one foot already in the door; stuck to the ground, with proximity and passive power becoming its gravity, as his cologne melts into his sweat on another night I think I’d rather be somewhere else. I weigh his integrity like my bones depend on it. His insecurities and how he blames the world, or himself, or another instead. While perching me high, as though I am any less flawed than the girls he talks, as if casted characters in his plot.
It was here that I noticed more. I began to wonder if femininity is only adored when attached to a masculinity. Or when it stays within the lines of archetypal desirability. If being loud requires a reason to. Not based on words or expertise, but pardoned through a window of tolerance when in submission to other use. Threat softened by constraint. Resentment subdued, as audacity can only travel so far when her evenings greet a man at the door. As perceived attention loses value when opportunity is limited. When the power of women is most considered in how her inescapable sexual nature exposes the vulnerability of a man’s self-control. How tragic. To assign responsibility dressed as an invitation, to always hate the infiltration when they forget we are more human then dolls. Blame locked and loaded of which complements the insecurities of the jury far and near.
Yet, I know this game too well to be fooled again, swept off my feet by what I already don’t believe in. So I adapted— strategy, maybe paranoia. Because on a pedestal stabilized by his weak mind, I no longer notice the clouds, only the space between me and the ground. Measuring its lethality.
Rejection stings when standing naked before an obvious miscalculation. A familiar prayer is that he sees the value in this equation made of me as less over more, so any disappointment startles softly. And if I slip away, my worth is not worthwhile enough to destroy in my wake. A bitter man is rarely discreet to begin with; a childish man, envious of a woman, rots in insecurity— his blood boiling, and her fragility a quiet, convenient expense to exploit. Destroying her in conjunction with any trace of his vulnerability, shattering the sight of his fledgling fantasy loose in the world where desire runs free. The space she would resume, his plan turned into a pause. Her skin, a canvas for other imaginations to paint. Erased as evidence of what he once claimed. He seeks to dissolve the reflection of his demise that simultaneously might look like hope to someone else. Because from the beginning, she was something to be won. Until there is nothing left of the light he couldn’t contain. His mark stamped where he otherwise could not. A message that thunders until she is smoothed into a familiarity at home in the dark.
So I learned the night, befriending the peace between the moon and stars. When the sky becomes entitled to secrets. A quiet exodus before mornings that may know my face but do not demand my proof.
