fruit of the poisonous tree

Fuck you.

All of you.

Go on, eat a dick.

funny, but not really, how one person can shit in a well and suddenly every drink of water tastes wrong.

used me like an ego IV. called me Dora and eagerly went exploring: love, sex, tenderness and affection, all the things he had spent forty years not touching. i thought we were discovering something together. turned out he was running drills. kept me warm on the bench while he went looking for the real thing, and kept me just ignorant enough to believe the bench was the game.

could have survived that, probably. my heart, our friendship, all of it. but my life went bad in a way that did not leave much of the fun version of me available, made me ugly company. inconvenient timing. once i stopped giving him what he needed, apparently his boyfriend could give him everything. upgrade boyfriend to husband. downgrade me to disposable.

knew exactly what that would do to me, too. he had been there for the last one. said it was horrible how a man could stay while there was still something to get from me, build himself a cushy little off-ramp somewhere else once i had nothing left to give, then leave. excellent analysis; he must have been taking notes. because he ran the same fucking play. kicked me loose in the gutter while i was grieving my mother, then called cutting off contact his way of being a good friend.

ever since, every petty little bastard from the same crowd catches the light. the selfishness. entitlement. vanity. gossip. the attention-seeking, drama-farming, and sanctimony. the tiny knives passed around like party favors. some bitchy stranger appoints himself sheriff of a fucking charity fun run and there it is again: of course you did.

reason knows better. reason says this is one asshole, then another asshole, then another, drawn from a population containing roughly the usual human percentage of assholes. hurt says shut up. hurt is keeping score now.