Like Candle Wax

I look to you and I see nothing. It's a skill I wish I didn't have. I can see your emptiness. So many years wasted trying to convince myself I was wrong and wishing I was. You're a skin covering with bad intentions, nothing more. You're a sheet of blackness in 3/4 time. You give waltzing a bad name; your ugliness takes something from it. Waltz and I have that in common. I can feel you mutating me on the inside - it's sudden, final and disconcerting. I look to you and I see nothing. Wasn't that a tv show called Q or something like that? A whole community or planet of people who were really lizards under their skin? I think I hated you for the lights you turned on in me. I still do. I'm not sure how long I hated myself after you. I don't remember feeling that so sharply then - as sharply as I did fifteen years later when patterns with the same kind of stealth, emotional bottom-feeder lizard energy revealed themselves.

I see you as the root cause event. Person. Schism. I look to you and I see all this and nothing.

I wonder if I look to you because it's easier than looking to myself. Well, it for sure is. Easier. This hatred has always been so strong, but it was always co-mingled with hatred for everyone around me, standing on the sidelines, looking but not seeing, clapping but not caring. Glittering beautifully but content to leave me alone in it as soon as the lights came down. I used to fear that moment as much as I looked forward to it - the moment the lights around the mirrors were unplugged, the moment we started putting things away - napkins, chairs - the time everyone's smiles melted from their faces like candle wax and it was time to go home.

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