#buzzing bees

I want to live in your sunrays bow to you like grass in a heated, lazy summer afternoon

I want to be consumed in you like the slow bees buzzing,

their wings fluttering to the tune of the melting honey

beneath their humming heartbeats

So I have been doing some reading to understand things, and I think he has some covert narcissist traits, I don’t feel confident enough to claim that he was a full blown narcissist of any kind, but the resemblance to several covert narcissistic traits are uncanny. 

And I realized that I think I am mourning a ghost. The “good man,” I met did not in fact exist. Looking back at our conversations, I think he was mirroring me. I think I conjured him. Or rather, he conjured some parts of me, built aspects of me inside of him and then whispered them back to me. My instincts were disguised as elitism. But they were correct. I felt unsure of him all along. 

The thing that hurts is that I let him into some of the most exclusive and precious parts of myself. The part of myself that dreams of a romantic partner. I have to admit to myself that he got in there. And then he abused it. As his mask came off to reveal an apparition. I thought I saw the sunshine in him once, but eventually saw a ghost. A ghost of where a healthy, balanced man should have been.

Another part that is painful, is that in the beginning, I needed all my girls to help me stay, and give him the benefit of the doubt over a few things. In the name of a chance at a Good Heart. But we’ve already talked about the cavern there. And now, with the things I have been reading and learning about, I find myself tongue-tied to explain to them what recovering from potential narcissistic abuse feels like: I am confused, and deeply hurt. I am hurt because it seemed like he knew he was hurting me and didn’t mind. Like he was a different person altogether.  The resemblance, I have to these “survivors” is uncanny. I don’t think I stayed long enough to be destroyed, but the buzzing anxiety in my chest is not going away. And I can tell you the moments it was put there, bookended by when I discovered the way he reacted to his own lie, and finally when he peeled back the skin on his face and showed me his anger. It is so haunting to me now when I think of all the times he would say to me “we have a healthy relationship.” And I would nod along out loud and whisper his lies, quietly, to myself. It is the reason I dream of sleeping outside in my dreams. It is the reason why I encounter him in my dreams and he confesses that he cheated on me. It is the reason why I can’t find anyone to douse burning trees. 

I think of him as a murderer. Because I think he created a man I admired, and could have loved, then he killed him. He killed a man I loved. He killed my mirror image. He stole that-self away. He stole that-self from me. Thief. 

And I can’t rally my troops and go after anyone, or anything, because that-self doesn’t exist. In our darkest conversation he told me he changes for each person. A changeling. A shape-shifter. 

And I knew something was off, I didn’t trust his upbringing, his self-assessments. But I wanted to. But nothing lined up. Nothing connected to nothing. I am glad I left, but I feel like he wanted me to go because there was no going back.  Like some silent agreement that I would go, and he would let me because he knew that I knew that nothing was True. He was an expert at maneuvering.

And I mean it. Nothing. Not in a dramatic way. In a gentle way. In a “Oh, that’s what it is,” way. In a way where you climb stairs to a mysterious attic, and in the darkness you fumble for a pull-chain light switch, and instead of chests, and boxes. There is just dust, and howling, and pain, and paranoia, and fake-ally ship, and misogyny, and fear, and bad-raising. And you just take the staircase ladder down to reality. 

I have begun deleting pictures. 

It has been a while since he last did that, but she still felt the pleasant butterflies on her tummy once he came closer. Honey was a little too playful as she looked up, her hands smoothing the front of the dark shirt he wore. The sweetest sound she made when they kissed was the intro cue for his hands and she in turn followed his moves. Her lashes barely fluttered as her eyes opened half way and her hand carded through his blond locks. Guiding his head, she whispered something on his ear.