Violeta Noir

About a month into our affair, I saw him.

Really saw him.

We were in bed when the mask dropped.

Just for a moment.

There you are.

That's what I said.

There you are.

I recognized the monster.

Maybe because I had one too.

Monsters recognize each other.

After that, I stopped pretending I didn't know what I was dealing with.

I warned him.

You may love my light, but don't forget the shadow I cast.

My darkness will consume you.

Dramatic?

Absolutely.

But by then I understood my audience.

Your husband didn't believe in boring.

So the production began.

He would later complain that I talked in circles.

I wasn't.

I was breaking the fourth wall.

Constantly.

I told him what I was doing while I was doing it.

Sometimes I practically yelled it.

You can't handle the truth.

He thought I was being theatrical.

I was.

He just didn't understand how literal the theater had become.

There was another truth your husband knew.

So did mine.

I picked your husband because he reminded me of mine.

Not vaguely.

In those stupid, tiny ways that shouldn't matter and somehow matter more than anything.

He wanted to learn the cello.

So did my husband.

He liked driving with the windows down.

So did my husband.

The beach.

The curiosity.

Certain ways of thinking.

Certain ways of moving through the world.

Little echoes everywhere.

My husband wanted to go to a 2Cellos concert.

Guess the first concert your husband suggested.

Yeah.

2Cellos.

Same personality type.

Same Big Three.

The same strange ways of reacting to me.

And now your husband is going to school for the exact same degree my husband pursued.

At some point the similarities became so strange that I told your husband something even I knew sounded ridiculous.

I think you and my husband are twin flames.

Not me and him.

Them.

My husband saw it too.

He once asked me:

What does he have that I don't?

I told him the truth.

Nothing.

He is you.

Because in so many ways, he was.

I hadn't gone searching for someone better.

I had found something familiar wearing another face.

I missed my husband.

There.

That's the truth.

Maybe one of the simplest truths in this entire story.

I missed him.

And your husband carried echoes of him.

But the parallels went deeper than hobbies and personality tests.

I met your husband at the same age I met mine.

Almost the same way.

And my husband was married too.

I had lived this before.

I knew this story.

I told your husband.

I told everyone.

My husband cheated on his wife with me.

Eventually, he left her and chose a life with me.

And years later, there I was again.

Another married man.

Another wife.

Another affair.

Another man imagining that eventually he could leave one woman and build a life with me.

Same stage.

Different cast.

Except this time,

I didn't want the ending.

Because the man who left his wife for me became my husband.

And eventually I had to live with the fact that I had married a man capable of cheating on his wife.

I wasn't interested in doing that twice.

There was another difference.

My husband and I eventually agreed to an open marriage.

Your husband didn't have that agreement with you.

He lied.

And every time your husband offered me the fantasy of becoming his wife, I couldn't avoid the obvious question:

Why would I want the position of the woman you're demonstrating you're willing to betray?

Wife wasn't a prize simply because your husband wanted to give me the title.

I'd already been a wife.

I'd already lived that ending.

Your husband thought he was offering me a future.

I recognized it as my past.

And there was another mirror inside the mirror.

I had a husband.

I wasn't required to work.

I went to school.

I homeschooled my children.

I raised them.

I created a business.

I had a husband providing enough security for me to build, learn, mother, create, and still belong to myself.

Your husband knew that life.

For years, he told me he was jealous of my husband for having the life with me that he wanted.

He imagined recreating it.

With me.

I declined.

That's the part that has to come first.

I declined.

Only afterward did he begin telling me how pieces of that template were appearing in the life he was building with you.

School.

Staying home.

Children.

Business.

The architecture of a life he had first heard from me.

Then imagined building with me.

And when I declined,

he took that architecture home and began building it somewhere else.

According to him, the similarities weren't accidental.

He told me what he wanted to find underneath it.

Me.

He told me he wanted to find me underneath you.

Creepy.

That's what I thought.

Fucking creepy.

But horrifying?

No.

I didn't spend much time thinking about what I didn't want.

I already knew I didn't want that life with him.

I had declined it.

So I noticed.

Filed it away.

Another form of obsession.

And perhaps I should have taken that obsession more seriously.

Because it wasn't the first time I'd heard him talk about stepping into somebody else's life.

He told me something very early on that I never forgot.

Back then, your husband talked entirely too fucking much.

This was before I introduced him to meditation.

Before the journaling.

Before I started suggesting that maybe every thought didn't require an audience.

He would just talk.

And I listened.

God, did I listen.

People will tell you astonishing things about themselves when they haven't learned to edit yet.

Somewhere inside all that talking, he told me something about his father.

I could live my father's life. Better.

I remembered that.

Of course I did.

Because eventually I started seeing the pattern.

He didn't always seem to imagine a life from scratch.

Sometimes he found existing architecture.

And stepped into it.

His father's.

Mine.

And choosing you only made the pattern stranger to me.

His father's former mistress's niece.

A woman who had grown up close enough to the family that, from where I stood, the whole thing already carried the eerie familiarity of an old story being recast with younger actors.

And you went along with it.

Now you want to stand on the other side of this story draped in holiness and devotion?

Please.

Spare me the theatrics.

I see through it.

I've seen too much backstage.

The costumes.

The rehearsals.

The borrowed scripts.

The recycled sets.

Because your husband didn't only try on lives.

He tried on entire personalities.

Different posture.

Different language.

Different philosophy.

Different man.

For a while.

Then I watched him try on mine.

That one made me laugh.

He mirrored my language.

My philosophies.

My strategies.

My way of framing problems.

There are no problems, only solutions.

Mine.

Play with fire, you'll end up burned.

Mine.

Pieces of my language walking around in his mouth.

He tried on pieces of my personality and looked back at me as though I wouldn't recognize my own clothes.

Baby.

Of course I recognized them.

But the truly hilarious part was that he was trying to mirror a woman who was already adapting herself to the scene in front of her.

He was playing a character that was a mirror of him,

as himself.

A reflection imitating its own reflection.

It was comedy.

Albeit a tragic one.

And the copying didn't stop with philosophy.

It became visual.

I noticed the shades of eyeshadow.

Colors that flattered me.

My complexion.

My skin.

My coloring.

Then I saw them on you.

Your straight hair became curly.

Then there was the blue.

My blue hair.

Then yours.

Except according to your husband,

that wasn't your choice.

He told me he chose it.

Interesting.

Especially coming from the same man who had already told me:

I want to find you underneath her.

Then the lashes.

I asked him one simple question.

Does she wear lashes?

No.

Interesting.

I didn't tell him you should.

I didn't tell him to suggest them.

I simply asked the question.

Then came the lashes.

Well, shit.

Then the nose ring.

I told him I thought your nose ring made you look masculine.

That was it.

I didn't tell him to ask you to remove it.

I didn't tell you to remove it.

I introduced an opinion.

And waited.

The next time I saw your picture,

it was gone.

My phrases became his phrases.

My philosophies became his philosophies.

My architecture became something he told me he was recreating in your home.

My curls.

My blue.

Colors that flattered my skin.

Lashes.

Language.

Philosophy.

Lifestyle.

And behind all of it, that sentence:

I want to find you underneath her.

Maybe I'm wrong.

But once is coincidence.

This is a pattern.

And if there is one thing I trust about myself,

I am a master at pattern recognition.

I had spent more than 100,000 hours studying psychology.

I watched people.

Systems.

Repetition.

Cause and effect.

I noticed when something happened once.

And I noticed when the same architecture appeared again,

and again,

and again.

His father's life.

My life.

My personality.

My language.

My philosophies.

My aesthetics.

He didn't merely mirror people.

He tried on entire lives.

And yes,

I probably should have found his obsession considerably more concerning than I did.

I probably should have walked away.

Instead, I looked at all those little reflections accumulating around me and interpreted them as something else.

Devotion.

Another offering at my altar.

What can I say?

I liked the altar.

And curiosity has always been one of my more dangerous appetites.

So rather than leave, I kept watching.

What happens next?

The curious cat got killed first.

I know.

At least I have nine lives.

Once I found the strings,

I plucked them.

Every fucking time.

Not always because I wanted something.

Sometimes I wanted nothing except the answer to one question:

What happens if I do this?

Pluck.

Watch.

Record.

Adjust.

Pluck again.

I told your husband exactly how my brain worked.

You all are an experiment.

I told him life itself was nothing more than the scientific method in action.

Observe.

Question.

Hypothesize.

Experiment.

Collect the results.

Change the hypothesis when the evidence proves you wrong.

Repeat.

And while other people thought I was impulsive, your husband knew another truth about me.

My plans could span ten years.

I could be fascinated by what happened in the next ten minutes while simultaneously thinking about the next decade.

Contradictory?

Probably.

So am I.

I told him what I read too.

The Art of War.

The Prince.

The 48 Laws of Power.

Not hidden on some secret shelf.

I talked about them.

Discussed strategy with him.

Offered him advice.

Reading material.

I even tried to sharpen his own ridiculous manipulative tools.

I gave the man the blueprint.

There was another thing I used to tell your husband.

You're not smarter than me.

He would interrupt.

I know.

But I hadn't finished.

I wasn't talking about intelligence in general.

I meant:

You are not smarter than me on the subject of me.

You can watch me.

Analyze me.

Memorize my habits.

Catalogue my reactions.

Read every book I hand you and convince yourself you've found the mechanism underneath the machine.

You haven't.

I have lived inside myself my entire life.

I know the rooms.

The doors.

The locked ones.

The beautiful ones.

The ones I burned down and rebuilt with my bare hands.

I told him about my head injury.

About circling the edges of psychosis.

About having to slingshot myself back toward reality for the sake of my children.

About learning what my own mind could manufacture when reality stopped feeling entirely trustworthy.

But even that isn't the whole truth.

Because I wasn't merely standing at the edge of some abyss.

I wasn't simply swimming in it.

I am the abyss.

I am my demons.

I am my light.

I am every version of myself that has died and every version that clawed its way back.

I have died and returned like a phoenix screaming

More

more times than I can count.

More life.

More feeling.

More truth.

More experience.

Again.

Again.

Again.

There are things I know that I can only really discuss with people who have been to their own edge and found their way back.

People who have looked into something inside themselves that frightened them and stayed long enough to recognize the face looking back.

Real recognizes real.

And that's why, for all his studying of me, I knew something your husband didn't.

He would never know me.

Fascinated?

Absolutely.

Desired?

Constantly.

Worshipped?

God, yes.

Loved?

Yes.

But known?

No.

He knew what I showed him.

The stories.

The performances.

The experiments.

The shadow I deliberately placed beneath the light.

But knowing the map isn't the same as knowing the country.

Baby,

you were on the guided tour.

Your husband used to complain about my constant microanalysis of him.

He said he was tired of it.

It never stopped.

But half the time, I wasn't even analyzing him.

I was wondering why the hell he refused to analyze himself.

Why couldn't he see the absurdity of what he was saying?

Why did he think I would believe explanations that collapsed under the weight of one follow-up question?

Why did he keep presenting words as though merely saying them gave them power?

His words had no power over me.

Not when his behavior contradicted them.

Sometimes I would listen to him explain something ridiculous and think:

Who exactly is this performance for?

Then I remembered something.

He told me you were an INFP.

Ah.

Different player.

Different language.

Different fighting style.

And what worked somewhere else had taught him to expect it to work everywhere.

It didn't work with me.

Because my personality changed when the scene changed.

Sometimes ENTP.

Sometimes ENTJ.

INTJ.

INFJ.

Sometimes something else entirely.

No, I don't mean my literal personality magically changed.

I changed characters.

Strategy.

Tone.

Posture.

Access.

Warmth.

Silence.

Confrontation.

Whatever the scene required.

That's what happens when you've spent more than 100,000 hours studying psychology.

You notice context.

Adaptation.

Performance.

How differently people respond to different versions of the same stimulus.

Method acting became easy.

So watching him try to mirror me was especially fucking funny.

He'd identify one version and think:

There.

I figured you out.

Meanwhile, I was already backstage changing costumes.

And perhaps that's the difference between us.

I knew I was performing.

I knew where the character ended.

I knew who was underneath.

With him, I kept wondering:

Who are you when nobody else is in the room?

Your father's life.

My architecture.

My language.

My philosophies.

My personality.

Another costume.

Another role.

Strip away every borrowed script, every mirror, every audience, every person he wanted to become.

What remained?

I wanted to meet that man.

Maybe that's why I kept plucking the strings.

I wasn't trying to figure out which character your husband was playing.

I wanted to know whether there was anyone backstage.

And before anyone rewrites this into a story where I innocently stumbled into all of this and merely observed it:

No.

I manipulated pieces of it.

Absolutely.

I fucked with the lighting.

Changed the script just to watch everybody improvise.

Covered your husband's body in hickeys knowing perfectly well he was going home to you.

I wanted you to see them.

There is no innocent explanation for that.

Sometimes I wasn't merely observing the chaos.

I poked it.

Sometimes because I was angry.

Sometimes because I was entertained.

Sometimes because curiosity got the best of me.

And he would get upset.

Then?

He came back.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I told him what happens when I lose all respect for someone.

I turn them into a lab experiment.

I told him I didn't respect you.

I told him within two months of knowing him that I had lost respect for him too.

Cruel?

Yes.

True?

Also yes.

And yet,

he returned to the altar.

Gifts.

Attention.

Money.

Devotion.

Desire.

Delicious sex.

And before you think I invented the title for this story:

your husband called me Goddess.

I didn't ask.

He offered.

He walked into my house once and saw the gifts spread across my table from a wishlist called:

Spoil Me.

Including lingerie.

I left it there.

On display.

He mentioned it.

I smiled.

Some of that lingerie came from other men.

I wore it for your husband.

I watched the effect it had on him.

I enjoyed every second.

He once told me:

I saw how you looked at me.

I answered:

Have you ever considered that you see what I want you to see?

Again.

The fourth wall.

I wasn't hiding the machinery.

I pointed directly at it.

Look.

There's the camera.

And eventually you walked through it too.

You went through his phone.

You saw the pictures of us.

Naked.

Together.

You saw his messages.

The worship.

The yearning.

The addiction.

And you saw mine.

That's important.

You saw mine too.

The hunger went both ways.

The darkness went both ways.

The devotion went both ways.

Sometimes you left voice notes.

Once, you wanted to talk:

woman to woman.

But I didn't experience us as two women competing for one man.

I had already rejected the life he kept trying to offer me.

I didn't need your husband to choose me.

So when you said:

woman to woman,

what I heard was:

Goddess to girl.

Cruel?

Absolutely.

Arrogant?

Spectacularly.

But that's where I was standing inside my own mythology.

And your husband had supplied the title.

Even on his birthday.

His mother was in town.

You were pregnant.

And he was with me.

Couples massage.

Balcony sex.

Sunrises over dunes.

And laughter.

God,

the giggling.

I can still hear us.

That's something I won't become too arrogant to admit.

We were happy.

Sometimes ridiculously happy.

His eyes looked like sunrises themselves.

Full.

Shiny.

Content.

Mine were too.

That's the inconvenient tenderness underneath all this talk of altars and experiments.

I wasn't laughing at some fool who adored me while I felt nothing.

I adore him too.

I delight in him.

His mind.

His laughter.

His attention.

The ridiculous things we did together.

That part was real.

And one truth remains painfully simple:

I love your husband.

Present tense.

Not enough to become his wife.

Not enough to give him my future.

Not enough to make his consequences my responsibility.

But I love him.

Something can be selfish, destructive, manipulative, unsustainable, and still contain moments of extraordinary beauty.

Those moments don't absolve us.

But I won't desecrate them by pretending they weren't real.

And then the altar became something else.

Because he didn't only bring me himself.

He brought me pieces of you.

Your reactions reached me through him.

Your words reached me through him.

My words reached you through him.

You once repeated my own phrase.

Community dick.

My words coming out of you.

Eerie.

And, if I'm telling the truth,

powerful.

Things from my home physically crossed the threshold into yours.

Literally.

Look at the mat your little dog sits on in your profile picture.

That mat was mine.

Before it sat beneath your dog, it spent years beneath my feet, easing my ankles while I built a successful business.

My feet pressed into it.

My weight rested on it.

My life happened above it.

And now it's in your home.

Under your dog.

In your profile picture.

That's almost too perfect to write.

But the mat isn't the only thing in that house that knew me.

Your couch.

The one your husband complained about until you sold it.

His car.

Your car.

Your bed.

Eventually his bed.

The air mattress.

Those new ugly couches.

The stairs.

The bathrooms.

Your kitchen.

His beard.

His body.

My ocean has seen all of it.

My water.

My essence.

The thing your husband himself named.

Ambrosia.

His word.

Not mine.

Another name I didn't ask for.

He loved carrying traces of me away.

My essence staining his beard, turning it red.

He would tell me later he could still smell me on his moustache.

He loved leaving me all over him.

And again:

he told me.

He even told me that sometimes when he was intimate with you, he couldn't finish until he closed his eyes and imagined me.

I didn't have to sneak into your bedroom.

According to your husband,

he brought me there himself.

He kept trying to carry the tide between houses.

My water on his body.

My name in his mind.

My image behind his eyelids.

My language in his mouth.

My belongings crossing thresholds.

My preferences appearing elsewhere.

He couldn't seem to leave me where he found me.

Baby,

you carried the ocean home.

And then something happened I found even more interesting.

You didn't always recoil from it.

You told him it turned you on.

You told him you didn't care.

And he told me.

You kissed him after I climaxed on his face, after he'd spent hours between my thighs.

You tasted him after my juices had dried on his skin and stayed there for a day.

According to him,

you liked it.

Later you said you thought he'd snap out of it.

Please.

Don't think I didn't see through your performance too.

From where I stood,

you wanted me just as badly as he did.

Maybe differently.

Maybe through him.

Maybe the forbiddenness itself was part of the thrill.

I couldn't know what was actually inside your head.

But I knew what your husband said you told him.

And I knew what I made of it.

You both tasted my sweet ambrosia.

That's why I consumed you too.

But when your husband came to my door,

the current only moved one way.

I never once tasted you.

Never.

I wouldn't.

Whatever he carried in from outside stopped at my threshold.

I told him to wash his body of the filth he brought in from outside.

And don't you dare climb into my bed wearing outside clothes.

My bed was my sanctuary.

My sheets.

My rules.

My space.

He learned them.

Then, like he always did,

he adapted.

He bought satin underwear specifically for my house.

Pink.

Gold.

Champagne.

Even galaxy.

My colors.

Little silken costumes waiting for him on my side of the threshold.

Looking back, even that fits the pattern.

I established the environment.

Your husband learned how to dress for it.

He crossed my threshold and changed costume.

Of course he did.

By then, that's what your husband had become remarkably good at.

I consumed him.

I did not consume you.

Not that way.

What I consumed was everything that came back through him.

Your fascination.

Your desire.

Your devotion.

Your own form of obsession.

I watched you make yourself look ridiculous for a man who couldn't even give you the sentence you deserved.

His wife.

The woman carrying his child.

The baby I had denied him.

Because yes,

I had considered having his child.

And I had conditions.

A year single.

Time to learn how to parent.

Time to become the kind of man I would even consider giving another child.

He didn't meet them.

So I said no.

And there you were,

carrying the baby I had refused to give him.

I asked him about you in bed.

I asked him if he loved you.

There were so many answers he could have given.

Yes.

She's my wife.

She's carrying my child.

Anything.

Instead, his answer was:

I don't hate her.

I don't hate her.

Jesus.

I didn't even have to sharpen that blade.

He handed it to me already cutting.

And that was the man you were rearranging yourself around.

The hair.

The lashes.

The makeup.

The devotion.

The forgiveness.

Whatever private negotiations happened inside your marriage.

All for a man whose answer to whether he loved his pregnant wife was not

of course.

Not even

yes.

I don't hate her.

And somehow you thought I was the woman competing with you.

No.

I had already declined the position.

That's the part you never seemed to understand.

I didn't want to become you.

I didn't want your marriage.

I didn't want your title.

I didn't want the baby.

I wanted what I wanted from your husband,

until eventually I didn't want that anymore either.

So yes,

through him,

I consumed your fascination.

Your desire.

Your devotion.

Your obsession.

But when he crossed my threshold, he washed you off.

Then he put on his satin.

Pink.

Gold.

Champagne.

Galaxy.

My colors.

He crossed my threshold and changed costume.

Of course he did.

This was, after all,

a production.

And even your son carries an echo.

The name of my dead best friend.

A man your husband never knew.

A man who died before your husband was even old enough to legally drink.

And still, your husband looked at that name and told me it was sentimental

to us.

Us.

As though my grief had somehow become a relic of our relationship.

As though a man he never met, whose death belonged to a life I lived long before him, had somehow become part of our mythology.

I looked at him with disgust.

No.

That wasn't ours.

That was mine.

My friend.

My grief.

My memory.

My dead.

Your husband had nothing to do with it.

And somehow even that became something he tried to pull inside the orbit of us.

Creepy.

Another thing he wanted to absorb.

Another piece of somebody else's history folded into his own.

His father's life.

My architecture.

My language.

My philosophies.

My aesthetics.

My personality.

And now even my dead.

Somewhere inside all of this, I understood what the two of you had accidentally created.

You exalted me into a Goddess.

Not because I actually was one.

But because your husband treated me like one.

He worshipped my body.

My mind.

My darkness.

My approval.

My attention.

My opinions.

And I interpreted so much of what followed as further devotion.

Perhaps I should have recognized obsession sooner.

Perhaps I should have walked away.

I didn't.

What can I say?

I liked the altar.

I liked the offerings.

I liked the devotion.

I liked touching the board and waiting to see what moved.

Until I didn't.

Because eventually influence stopped being interesting.

The experiment stopped producing new information.

He would come back.

Angry.

Fascinated.

Offended.

Aroused.

Whatever.

But back.

Once I knew the answer, the experiment became boring.

Being a Goddess started looking suspiciously like another job I hadn't applied for.

I didn't want responsibility for your marriage.

I didn't want responsibility for your husband.

I didn't want responsibility for you.

I didn't want another universe to manage.

I wanted my life.

Mine.

That's the thing about this story.

Everybody knew something.

Not everything.

Not all at once.

But enough.

You knew where he went.

My husband knew who he was.

Your husband knew I saw other people.

You saw our photographs.

You read our messages.

He knew I'd lost respect for him.

He knew I experimented.

He knew I lied.

He knew I could manufacture a reaction.

He knew I showed him what I wanted him to see.

I told him.

Again.

And again.

And again.

There was no fourth wall.

There hadn't been for a very long time.

Everybody had pieces of the script.

And somehow everybody kept behaving as though the truth was hiding somewhere.

It wasn't.

Sometimes it was lying naked in his phone.

Literally.

And that's the strangest part.

Your husband thought he was studying me.

You thought I wanted your position.

My husband thought your husband possessed something he didn't.

Everybody was looking in the wrong direction.

Because while your husband was looking for me in you,

I had found my husband in him.

My husband was the original language.

Your husband was an echo.

There could never have been your husband without mine.

That's the real tragedy.

Your husband didn't replace my husband.

He walked into rooms inside me my husband had already built.

He triggered wounds I already knew.

Repeated patterns I had already survived.

And because the stakes were different,

because I didn't need him,

because losing him couldn't collapse the architecture of my life,

I got to respond differently.

Sometimes beautifully.

Sometimes terribly.

But underneath all of it, something was changing.

I healed the wounds of my marriage through your husband.

Not because he healed me.

He didn't.

He gave me another stage on which familiar wounds could appear without having the same power.

With my husband, abandonment had consequences.

Family.

Home.

History.

Children.

Half my life.

With your husband?

He could leave.

And eventually I discovered I would still be standing.

The wound stopped making the decision.

That's why my husband could never understand my answer when he asked what your husband had that he didn't.

Nothing.

That was never the point.

While your husband was looking for me underneath you,

I had found my husband inside him.

A hall of fucking mirrors.

Him looking for me in you.

Me recognizing my husband in him.

My husband looking at him and seeing a rival.

You looking at me and seeing a threat.

And your husband looking at all of us, trying on pieces of everyone and insisting the reflection was himself.

A comedy.

Albeit a tragic one.

Maybe I should have seen the obsession for what it was and walked away.

I didn't.

My curiosity got the best of me.

Again.

I interpreted some of it as devotion.

What can I say?

I liked the altar.

For a while.

But eventually,

I climbed down.

And perhaps that's the final asymmetry.

In your story, I became mythology.

Goddess.

Demon.

Mistress.

Threat.

Lilith.

The woman in the phone.

The woman in the photographs.

The woman whose shadow seemed to stretch across rooms she wasn't even standing in.

In my family's story?

His name will probably earn mild irritation.

Maybe an eye roll.

Mostly indifference.

Oh, him.

One of Mom's playthings while she healed from what Dad put her through.

That's almost crueler than hatred.

Because hatred makes monuments.

Indifference lets them crumble.

And yet I won't lie about him either.

He isn't meaningless to me.

I love your husband.

That's still true.

An important chapter.

A beautiful one in places.

A destructive one in others.

But still,

a chapter.

I stopped confusing love with destiny.

Desire with direction.

Influence with responsibility.

Power with obligation.

I stopped confusing the ability to move the pieces with a reason to keep playing.

And perhaps that's what I mean when I talk about echoes.

I couldn't even tell you how many men I've never so much as kissed have told me some version of the same thing.

That when they're alone, when the room gets quiet, when they look inward and hear their conscience,

it has my voice.

Think about that.

Men I've never touched.

Men I've never loved.

Men who were never invited anywhere near my altar.

And somehow, in those empty spaces, they hear me.

But most of all,

your husband.

He told me that when he's alone, he talks to me in those empty spaces.

That he feels me answering back.

An entire conversation with a woman who isn't even there.

And perhaps that's the strangest echo of all.

Because while he's somewhere talking to the version of me that lives inside his head,

I don't think of him at all.

Not in those empty spaces.

Not when the room becomes quiet.

There is no phantom version of him sitting beside me.

No imaginary conversation.

No voice answering from inside.

Nothing.

He carries an internal version of me.

I don't carry an internal version of him.

And maybe that's what an echo really is.

The original sound doesn't have to keep speaking.

Something else keeps repeating it.

Maybe my shadow remains.

Maybe the echo does too.

That's fine.

I don't have to be there for either one.

The tide already happened.

I had already lived this story once.

The first time,

I became the wife.

The second time,

I learned the game.

I studied the board.

I plucked every fucking string.

I showed him the machinery.

I handed him the blueprint.

I stood on the altar you both helped build.

And then,

when there was nothing left I wanted to learn,

I broke the fourth wall.