But he was always more lovely on the nights he came back alone. Lovely, because he was completely inebriated, lost in a dazzling spectacle of intoxicated affection, willing to whisper sweet promises into my impatient ears. Words that always connoted more because they transpired from his beautiful lips, elegant and familiar, formed from stuttered consonants and prolonged vowels. Gentle sentences that ended abruptly, only to transpire back together once he was able to form them carefully in his fragmented mind, addled with thick obscurity that prevented perfect cohesion. Unfortunately, even on those occurrences in which he appeared entirely sober, the layered darkness of his pupils expanded, his words could hardly be taken seriously. Yet, like a desperate juvenile, I greedily accepted the precarious lies as if they were nothing but honest truth that I could seldom survive without. An intoxicating elixir that I consumed despite the pain my convoluted heart accepted with a prodigious willingness.
But I was an eager listener, and I accepted each impression with a greedy appetite as if it were the cure to the leaden weight that compressed directly on the center of my chest, a crushing presence that often made it difficult to forget. A failure to recall all the past instances of his exploitations, an aggrieved abuse that served as a reminder that I was the one who suffered the most. Yet, I was incapable of acknowledging this terrible anguish because I had once believed he could provide steady comfort instead of painful scars. And I wanted him to prove himself worthy of my admiration, but he only opened my eyes to the darkest parts of our reality. A horrifying existence in which I could never hope to abscond.
But I continued to accept each battering or thinly-veiled insult with afflicted confidence that only a splintered heart could instill. An inability to sustain that only cost me more of the treasured self that I was slowly failing with each passing day. A deprivation that would surely cost me everything, especially as my life became entirely dependant upon another. A man who could barely maintain a promise to return home each evening without a faint outline of cherry-flavored lip gloss glued against the drooping skin of his haggard physiognomy. Perhaps it might be difficult to appreciate the slender wrinkles, but I had once been tortured by those delicate marks of age.
But it was becoming harder to leave, with every opportunity passing like the unrecognizable shift between seasons: gradual, but present. To continue existing as if I finally understood that nothing would ever resolve itself, but I was not brave enough to terminate the inevitable. Rather, I would simply wait in profound expectation as he meticulously destroyed every last part of me that I considered good. A cataclysmic destruction of which only hindsight could have foreseen. I was not fortunate enough to enjoy such an advantage, yet I often wonder if it could have made a difference in the end.
But I loved him regardless, and that would always be my biggest regret.
