I can feel you falling awayI'm supposed to be making dessert but instead of putting ice cream on pie I'm breathing into a paper bag. The devil came for dinner and tonight he's talking over and around me and I am pickled in evil now. It's in my hair, the fumes are in my clothes, it's caked under my nails and even my teeth are coated in Caleb's malevolence tonight. He isn't happy and I am too insolent to give a fuck.
No longer the lost
No longer the same
And I can see you starting to break
I'll keep you alive if you show me the way
Forever and ever the scars will remain
I'm falling apart
Leave me here forever in the dark
Bridget's busy running around the countryside, buying big clean jars of honey and fresh new potatoes and driving with all the windows down and the stereo up, and price-comparing colored pencils for school and folding towels to put away and unpacking even more boxes and...
..completely ignoring him.
Snort.
Tonight he bent Ben's arms back to grab the olive branch that he surreptitiously wedged into Ben's hands and he pretty much invited himself out to the rugged, less-densely populated cliffs to give me the lovely mental picture of pushing him off one of them. So I made spaghetti because Caleb hates spaghetti but Henry adores it so what was he going to do other than take a few bites and then attempt to continue to top up my glass of wine while he spoke with the children about their first day at their new school, managing to mask his disdain for all things publicly funded and therefore uncontrollable by him (see example: BRIDGET).
After the first two glasses I suddenly realized what he was doing and stopped drinking. Fool me twice, shame on all of us. For fuck's sake. Nothing ever changes. I wish he would go home. Instead he asks Ben how he thinks I'm doing and then he watches me while I sit there and scowl at him, smoothing ruffles, fluttering fingers that give me away. Nervous. Anticipatory. Exhausted and impressionable. Worn down. Suggestible. Defeated. Helpless. Ben will eventually create the rescue inside my head with a carefully logical set of phrases that Lochlan gifted to him ages ago and I will go to Bridgetworld where everything is lilacs and Mozart and beach glass and chocolate-chip cookie dough and beards and hearts and arms that don't want to hurt me except in only the good ways and not the ways in which I need to trade more pain for less pain with demonstrative fear.
As usual, I say too much. As usual, it's out of a desperation that only a clean white page can possibly understand because the depth isn't visible to anyone save for the princess and the devil. The knights turn a blind eye and the night a heavy hand.
Stupid ice cream is melting.