Jennifer Karen Hart

An obsessive-compulsive Borderline, I clenched my little pink calming pill, a placebo nonetheless, but a quick dose to withstand the chaos and its shiny impulses plus the dueling domains of my supposed madness. At that time, I needed an infatuation to entertain my mind, a favorite person to adore and subsequently pin my very existence onto… until their lust would remotely mirror mine. 

As I spotted the divergent pathways that split before me, I opened my near-empty satchel of mementos, a collection of appetizing thoughts. I swallowed the fragments with my pink pill as I faced the approaching storm. My emotions began to unleash from their tightly sealed bottles, raw and unplugged. 

I inched forward as a peasant turned goddess with my temporary lover, the hero turned villain, by my side. I needed to run head-on into that storm. I needed space before I suffocated from his thorn in my new wings. I suddenly needed freedom from all things intimacy. Our relationship had just become real that very instant, and I was suddenly no longer grossly infatuated with the idea of being his.

I needed to find a new favorite person to cleave my identity onto, someone who would instead hang a constant ultimatum over my head in the form of a perpetual fear of his or her abandonment. 

Sheets of black satin draped down the chiseled contours of her naked thighs.

Fueled by linguistic foreplay, I watched her body twitch. My mind raced in a pornographic daydream, a dream tainted with inherent sin. She laid there before me— exposed and untamed—with an offering in both eyes that no one with any fantasy coming to life could refuse.

My better judgment whispered in the shadows of my mind, but I disregarded all previous warnings of her abusive nature and its notorious wrath. I knew better: I knew to restrain from sampling her pheromones. Having one fix would only leave me perpetually salivating for another.

Then…months down the road of cautions left unheeded, I found myself trapped in her velvet shadow and in the blackest of evil nights. I struggled daily with my self-inflicted starvation. My thoughts spoke to me like a demonic dictator. They echoed from the dark side of hell. My soul laid wrapped in layers of marvelous madness. I suffered from the vacant wounds of heartache because, in the end, she fucked with my head…and sadly, nothing else. I grew to hate her but worried excessively that my deity would one day abandon me.

My lust for her evolved into another fiction of my disillusioned mind. She was gone before I knew it. And after the rollercoaster ride, I had but only a fading memory left over, a burning image I could not caress. With writing as my only remaining outlet, I grabbed a pencil and opened a fresh notebook. I leaned forward and hovered over its bare pages that simply laid there, spread open… like her bare body used to do.

I was rushed to the hospital for what I believed was my “doom”. Only, I had suffered from a “Panic Attack”– an extreme episode of anxiety. The devil reigned over me that night with a self-affirming sense of accomplishment. She haunted my soul and successfully charred my last nerve.

I often tangoed with the devil because I craved the associated adrenaline rush. She kept a thorn fastened between the moist petals of her blood-red lips. As we stepped together, my meek hands rested in her calculating paws. Our decrepit souls hovered in synchronicity with our steps…and we just danced for hours. We stepped right through the stroke of midnight and into dawn’s witching hour. Acid pumped through her veins, and I fed on the enticing liquor that night…until I blacked out. She stepped over my lifeless body, her feathers completely unruffled by my demise.

The devil captured my soul, slowly torturing me with her flaunting sex appeal.

She used her raving beauty as her weapon, and I fell six feet underground every time she broke my heart. Crying “mercy” proved fruitless, as I had exhausted that option far beyond fatigue. How could I have loved such a heartless attention-whore?

Within seconds, I hyperventilated and panicked for my life. My mind screamed and raced with paranoia as I questioned my sanity and the nature of my existence. My heart violently hammered against the inner walls of my chest, and its beat echoed right through my eardrums. The room spun, but I did not have vertigo. I lost my peripheral vision as someone with Hysterical Blindness. I lost control of my limbs, which tremored in fear. My voice shrieked for help, but who was screaming on my behalf? An introvert surely couldn’t yell that loudly.

At our initial tango, my kneecaps trembled profusely. Caught off guard, I assured myself I would never again fall smitten by her pseudo charm. I could see right through her high polished rust. Thus, I would reside two steps ahead of her mind games. And so, I vowed: never again to succumb to such mental injury. But I returned again and again for the enticing dance, spellbound by her evil eye. I was her recurring victim and albeit her incessant victory.

And then I understood why hindsight notoriously scores a perfect “20-20” vision and how love registers as “legally blind”.