Did I stalk you like a tiger, with no thought for your own inner being?
It didn't feel that way at the time. Never did it feel like a conquest borne of right or entitlement. It was a pleading with you to share all you had to share with me, a deep longing to visit inside your whole self, to experience your being. To try to understand what made you tick, to intertwine my energy with yours, not to steal yours, or secrete it away inside me, but to feel it, the ebb and flow. To rush through your arteries as your blood did, to build up in your groin as semen does when your balls draw up in that moment before orgasm, when everything is open to the world, before the doors begin to close again.
I was so fascinated by you, I wanted to be closer and closer still. I wanted you inside me in hopes that I might glimpse what was inside of you. Never to conquer, or to possess, but to simply be at one. Was this a selfish desire? Did it come at the risk of something of yours? I never wanted to be a risk. I have yet to find my balance, but I do not consider myself a danger to others. Is this naive? Do I fail to recognize the power I might have? I have never felt any power in me but that to banish and drive away. I'm good at driving away, it would seem.
How sobering to find that I may indeed be a destroyer.
Plants fail to thrive around me. People complain of my coldness, how I seem to calculate and run reckless with the delicate humans with whom I come in contact. I am perceived as indestructible, yet chaotic, dangerous and yes, sometimes predatory. None of it feels right.
I don't lurk in the bushes, lying in wait for moments of weakness to exploit.
I try to hide myself, tuck my humanity deep iniside, for what? So that the predators cannot prey on me.
What is it they say? About how what we see most often when we look at others is merely a reflection of ourselves, distorted by that which we cannot fathom? Do I see predators and destroyers everywhere because I myself am one?
I feel threatened by the friendships built by those I feel attempted my destruction. One such person told me that I always landed on my feet, that my life was charmed. It wasn't meant as a compliment. Despite a dearth of complimentary things to say about my friends at the time, I feel as though this same person now stalks them, wanting to win them over to a side of a battle I don't want to be in.
In the past, these people were a symbol of my descent into the animalistic, the hedonistic and predatory. Now they are friends to be won, why do I feel threatened by this? Why do I imagine a battle here at all? I don't imagine myself a warrior, and yet I see battles. Might they be giants, disguised as windmills? If I see that they are only windmills, then why do I continue to be afraid of them?
I want my friends to be mine, without chance of their swaying by the rumours and incharitable comments which alienated past friends. But perhaps my friends need warnings that I am not what I appear. Perhaps I am not.
I wish I knew.
