A Quiet Exodus
A personal reflection on experiencing 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 watch eyes light up when my drink becomes two, and catch harmless offerings that carry a discreet objective. Offer a sliver of power, and everything between him and me becomes his oyster. That is, in the joint he smokes during Sunday socials, but the cigarette I can’t without raising disgust. The small illicit cruelties. The pain that justifiably dropped his pants for a mouth with no 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 my mind 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 his muse becomes misleading. Afraid of my own truth because I know the danger in saying I don't like you. Or, I don't want this anymore. The risk of predetermination. The depths of my hallows, explored as complexity, 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 power becoming its gravity. As his cologne melts into his sweat on another night I’d rather be somewhere else. I weigh his integrity like my bones depend on it. His insecurities and how he blames the world, while perching me high, as though I am any less flawed than the girls he talks, cast as characters in his plot.
It was here that 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 her words, but pardoned through a window of tolerance if she serves another use. Its threat softened by constraint, because audacity can only travel so far when her evenings greet a man at the door. And resentment subdues as attention loses value when opportunity is limited.
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 stacked 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. My prayer is that he sees me as less over more, so any disappointment startles softly, and if I slip away, my worth is not worth enough to destroy. A bitter man is rarely discreet to begin with; a childish man, envious of a woman, rots in insecurity— his blood boiling, her fragility a perfect expense to exploit. Never leaving what he wanted as beautiful as he had found it. Destroying her in conjunction with any trace of his vulnerability, avoiding the sight of his fantasy loose in the world where desire runs free. A world 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 destroy 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.
