He talked back

“You may pride yourself in evil girl, but you’ve got too much good.”

This was a man who I’d told where my evil dwelled. Who knew about the painful worship and the throat stripped raw with screams into porcelain oblivion. But faulted me for not having enough, or maybe I had enough, I just had too much good to counteract it. And I take being called good an insult and I wonder where that leaves me. Not in a good place I am sure. Clinging to evil when the good wants to take over. Like a child boasting of brawling, I stand shouting of evil but I can’t back up my claims even as I want the world to hear them. To recognize them, because the world had started to only see good and I needed to tell them they were wrong. But how wrong were they? Holding fast to deep dark secrets, evil in their nature, doesn’t curdle one’s soul. Evil can be removed through and emotional exorcism, shaken out through every pore. Its presence does not indicate a full takeover or the slaughter of remaining good. I had let myself believe that just because there was evil inside that I wanted someone to see, that it outweighed the essential purity of those giggles he’d heard and that beauty he’d seen. I still had a heart. And my baby made me believe. Just as he made me believe his evil ran down to the bone.

All this said with one sentence. My mind knows how to race and I am impatient for conclusions. But I knew it was a dismissal. I wasn’t hard enough or soft enough. Not pure in either direction. He told me this as we lay on the mattress on his floor. He hadn’t been back to my bedroom and it was still my bedroom for a least a little while longer. He had cleaned. I’d been gone for 10 days and he had cleaned. He said it was for me, but I knew that was untrue. And I wondered who he’d cleaned for as I stared at the new pile of condoms on his floor. Was this goodbye?

But he had me lay my head on his lap like we’d always done and I nestled my chin against his bare thigh as he leaned against the wall, a pillow propped behind his back and with the remote started what seemed like the hundredth bad movie we’d watched on the tiny television perched on a sideways crate at the foot of his bed.