Category: Hyde’s Bride

She couldn’t even remember the day’s numeric, anymore.

Only that it had seemed to be chosen because it was close to Valentine’s Day and her birthday.

A tidy bundle of dates clustered together in a nice, neat package that he could easily ignore and get away with as a repeated blip in his memory’s system.

Oops, so sorry about that…

But once passed, there’s no going back, right?

So the rest of the year, he’d be ‘home free’ to continue his tireless rejection of her.

He did not view me as capable
So long ago shut down on me

I learned to no longer speak
For it wasn’t polite company

But dreams were in my head
Desires repressed in our bed

Life’s will for creation’s certainty
Kept me growing despite apathy

For that family to later accuse her, when she had always been cautious and careful about asking for anything.

Their matriarch had done what she did for her descendants – and she happened to be a caring and proactively supportive, barely tolerated “bystander,” who only benefited by crumbs’ default!

To capture memories and experiences that have clung – transfering onto this paper?

Will they then leave me alone so that I can be relieved of suffering”?”

He was only a man who had been controlled by his demons.

He had judged her for her values
Condemned her for her curiosity

Resented her cheerful optimism
Negated her proactive inclusivity

And made damn well sure that
She’d struggle to keep anything

She had learned to ignore those who had ignored her.

She just stopped talking.

Having been cast off in her prime for “doing everything right” made her deeply worry that anyone would value and stay with her through her mid and later years.

She thought about how when she was a child, her mother’s Great Danes used to tower above her small form as a child,

It used to feel like she was protected by the gentle giants as they ranged and roamed around her, so she could let her guard down.

Now that her mother had ‘upgraded’ to even larger hounds, she experienced feeling safe like a child again whenever she got back for a visit.

“But I am just going to say it.

I used the upstairs public bathroom yesterday to avoid the smells of extreme circumstantial use by the homeless downstairs.

But then I was trapped upstairs in a smaller bathroom, unsure what was happening in the stall two doors over with two people engaged in longterm shuffling, groaning, and whispering.

People in desperate need find places to do things that the average people still trying to mask as ‘normal’ try to avoid if and when at all possible.

That’s me, for sure.

Don’t involve me.

Please, please, please – and definitely not directly.

If I cannot help, it is a torment to expose me.

Being wired to extreme empathy as a healer tells me too much information about smells and needs for sanitary assistance not being properly tended to.

What happened next was that the entire room suddenly became flooded to choking with one of the worst smells of long-baked unwashery that I have ever encountered.

I could not help but quickly (though quietly) scramble-fumble out of my stall and stuffing my face into my jacket just to be able to breath as I fled the bathroom for likely the first time ever not washing my hands.

I beelined, instead, to where I knew that I could find a courtesy sterile wipe and tissue by the clerk’s desk.

Reflecting back upon the maintenance care needed for that person being helped to use the bathroom – and clearly not being tended to consistently – threatened to send me into a despair cycle that I am still trying to dodge and out-distance on this second day returning for help with my paperwork.

I have since been having difficulty subduing a type of deep keening inside – for that person, for me, and for our society barely hinging on the brink of unnecessary and wasteful political disasters.”

They think it very rude in “polite company” to speak of the horrific truths that occur when a human gets stripped of the decent basics.

To get lice from a chair?

Being in the library, she encountered those left behind, and it was so very hard to find herself also in that category – although she still fought off looking the part.

She had done all and more to ensure that others were protected, and now with her injuries, the cold wind into her coat often felt sharper.

And she could often feel within her just under the surface a high keening of mourning worry.

She was afraid to let someone in because she had been so picked apart by past men.

They had not been so corrupted when she had known them, thus she had not been naive to believe in their good aspects.

It was just extremely shocking to realise later how much the matriarch’s and her support in love had kept them on track.

And when the matriarch had passed, they all chose to absolve any adherence, and instead embraced anarchy’s tyranny and cast about blame for their grief and losses.

In her mind, the arrow tip’s shard at last began working its way to the surface, extruding from imbedment in her heart.

She could not yet feel any relief, for so long had her tissues been frozen in shock and fear’s caution to carefully contain its position and keep it from tearing her apart.

She then buried it at their once matriarch’s grave, the place where she had tearfully and wretchedly prayed for guidance when all had turned insane and then, soon after, the truth behind lies had revealed itself to her.

The matriarch could cleanse the shard, seal it, and neutralize that negative energy, blessing the woman by their once mutual alliance to carry on with her own story, no longer bound to that family’s tragedies.

She dreamed that she finally told her ex-husband honestly, regretfully, and decidedly that she could no longer be with him, wait for him, or hold space for him in her heart.

And as she woke, she found herself speaking the words aloud to him as the dream with his presence faded, thus dissolving the hidden threads that had still bound her to him.

—

(Just now emerging)

They had not believed in good, therefore had not supported good – and then, promoted destruction due to misplaced skew in their agendas.

She had cared for them all, deeply.

When men were worth trusting and believing in.

He and his wife were excluded because they had not contributed to the needs of his own children.

Their betrayal, in her eyes, was simply the deciding factor.

—

(Title of multiple meanings)

The matriarch’s decisions later were a result from their own actions – but they discounted their own accountability and blamed the granddaughter-in-law because she did not let them get away with mal-intended deeds.

“I do not regret standing up for and protecting the woman who always did the same for us through any weather.”

She remembered when their matriarch was in the hospital, and her son’s wife tried to grab her purse to seize power of attorney.

“No…she put me in charge of her purse,” said the granddaughter-in-law (which had been true because she expected they’d take advantage in her moment of weakness), seizing the sachel back and calling for protective backup.

It was an act that later set the rest of the family against her

Jagged glass
Broken pottery

Cobblestones
Slick-wearied

Dirt-streaked
Tears’ honesty

On a cloaked
Face hiding

Eyes that still
See everything