jezebelinhell | Reflections: The truth between the lie.

“He asked me once, ‘what did I know of love?’” Catherine looked wistfully into the distance and blew the cigarette smoke from her lips. It writhed like a serpent in the air and was gone. “I told him that I knew everything about love. Everything. But that wasn’t the question that he was asking me, I said. It’s not what I knew of it. It’s whether I’ve held any amount of it for anyone before. He did not understand how either could be mutually exclusive. And there, in that moment, like a bone broken in half, he revealed to me the marrow of all his weaknesses. And I, the person that I was, sucked the very life out of him. I did not have fangs then. I had only the arsenal available to a woman at that time, but unlike most women who were ignorant of their true gifts, I knew that with that Trojan horse I could lay waste to his entire legacy. Like the Trojan horse, I was hollow on the inside and that made deceit and manipulation work for me while feeling nothing of guilt or love. I was born the perfect subversive element that could topple politicians and sway kings.

One night, years later, he lay dying at my hand. I had bled him for everything he had worked so tirelessly for in his life. He was still young. Handsome. It all ebbed out of him because he loved me. Because he trusted me. And in his dying moments some sort of fugue took hold of his mind and he was frozen in the moment of a single question. “What do you know of love?” He asked again, potentially for the first time for him. With his last breath I answered again, “Nothing.”

I was kind back then. I let him die knowing the truth.