Stilettos
By
Chantal
Love is much like a wild rose,
beautiful and
calm, but willing
to draw
blood in its defense.
Mark Overby
I walk with a heavy
heart. What an understatement.
I walk with the weight
of the world on my shoulders and the constant presence of
guilt in my soul.
A painted lipstick smile
adorns my face, deflecting any suspicion of lingering
pain with a laugh and artificial happiness.
The sound my stilettos
make as I walk down the corridors of my empty life, tells them that yes: I’m
dealing with it fabulously. A veritable pillar of strength that girl is, look
how she carries herself despite her loss. Go on girl, too blessed to be
stressed right?
My act is Oscar worthy, Angelina Jolie has nothing
on me. My performance:
flawless; the joyless depths of my eyes are my only
betrayer, my personal Judas.
Alas, when the audience
has gone home, and the movie screen is blank, that all
consuming pain comes to me again.
It never goes away, it
just waits for the time when I am alone and it can again ravish me as a
passionate lover devours the essence of his beloved.
Yet there is nothing
passionate about this lover. It engulfs my being in
complete sorrow sinking its sharp talons around my heart,
constricting to the point where breathing becomes unbearable. My soul has been
ripped to bloody shreds of misery part of it dying when the bullet ended his
life.
My hands may not have
pulled the trigger but they are not without blood.
I am as responsible for
his death as the coward who took him from me.
I failed him as his
woman, as his friend as his twin flame. God gave me the gift
of love and I threw it back at Him like a spoiled
child throws a toy she has barely
touched, wanting a better and more expensive one.
He and I were made for
each other. Countless couples regale in the same sentiment of designed love, we
truly fed on each other’s strengths, our weaknesses, our pride and our
insecurities. Ours was a dysfunctional, yet
unconditional love.
As a lamed person who
has lost a limb and still feels the phantom appendage, so
I feel his absent
presence. My heart and mind are in constant battle, my heart
cannot and will not come to terms with his death. My
mind is a selfish and cold thing that wants to forget. In essence that is our flaw as human beings-
our
hearts are hapless things that want to hold on to the
past, that want to love
beyond any reason. As the clichéd moth to the flame so
is the heart, a glutton for pain.
As Love is our greatest
attribute it is also one of our greatest downfalls.
The mind on the other hand
is a cold and calculating thing. It has no time for
such emotions, it registers pain, tells the heart to
deal with it in a timely
manner and move on. The mind is the doctor, who tells
you, your child has
ravishing cancer and only has a few months to live at
best, then goes out to play
nine holes of golf with his peers. He is not content
to deliver this news, but life must go on. The heart is the mother who holds on
to her child’s hand crying silent tears of sorrow so as not to worry him. She
will never know joy again; as sure as her child will die, she too has died;
killed by the words of her child’s physician.
Heroin killed my Tony,
and I let her. Her hold was too strong on him. Let not my words fool you, I come from the school of hard knocks. Centuries of
Spanish blood flow strongly through my veins. I am not a fighter by nature;
neither am I a Saint by any means. I do not enjoy
indulging in violence. Yet I will beat a bitch’s ass over what’s mine.
That demoness
named Heroin mopped the floor with me and I couldn’t do a thing about it. She
wanted Tony as much as he wanted her, and no matter how good the sex was, how
fly my ass looked in some jeans, or how just a soft kiss from me, was
enough to arouse in him the deepest lust; he always
went back to her.
Not even the purest love
that comes from holding your children, and hearing their innocent laughter
could make him leave her. Theirs was a love/hate relationship they had going.
He hated her, the way she made him feel about his self, the
things she made him do to get her. But oh what a high she gave him,
when she infused her sweet poison through him, he
felt omnipotent, he felt as if he
were God in the flesh. The ghetto
Messiah and his whore Mary Magdalene. How many times did I wish him
death? I cannot remember. Was I wrong to wish it? Perhaps I was, but when you
work your ass off to make ends meet and you have to boil water to bathe your
kids, do homework by candle light since your utilities
have been shut off for non payment, you really do not feel like sugar coating
things. Especially when that hard-earned green was used to
snort heroin on the streets of
Well, after about eight
years of this 3-way, my mind said fuck him and the
past I had with him. A 13-year past, a past filled with memories sweeter than
honey, a past that included three beautiful children, a past of sacrifice,
hardship, and the enduring true love that only a few people are blessed to have
experienced.
The man who could
protect me from all the fowl things in this world, just by holding
me in his arms and kissing my forehead was gone.
The man who thanked me with tears in his eyes for his
first born son, was gone. The man who
looked at me and whispered he could spend the rest of his life staring into my
eyes. That man was gone. It’s my turn to look into eyes. Eyes innocent from all
evil and devoid of all that is tainted by this
fucked up ass existence we call life. I look into the
eyes of these kids he and I created in an act of pure love.
I don't want these kids
to see Daddy nodding off anymore while they’re playing with him. And I'm
running out of excuses as to where Daddy was for the past week. So my mind
tells him to get the fuck out, it’s over. And this hardened west side thug
cries. Cries because he knows this time I’m not playing. This time its for real, he begs saying he will get help, he will
change because he needs his family like he needs air to breathe. But my mind
has heard this all before and knows that if I don’t do this now then I never
will. Now my heart is scared, it loves him too much to be away from him, it
feels it cannot go on if they are apart, so it reminds the mind of how they
first met, how the attraction was so intense it was unsettling, how it felt
when he did it to me for the first time, how the most simple things he did like
combing the tangles out of my hair after a shower made me feel as if I were a
celebrated Goddess.
The adoring look in his
daughter’s eyes as he spoke to her reminded me how caring
he was. No magazine or TV show could ever make her
feel insecure about who she was. Her Daddy always made her feel like she was
the star in his world. A flawless diamond, unbreakable.
How he looked onto his
son with such pride and love, knowing that the best part of him has been
infused into this little version of him. That this little boy would grow up to
be the man he knows has lived in him for so very long.
How he teared up as his youngest son crowned, and he held this
tiny life in his massive arms, overwhelmed with how the love for this little
being made him feel. Promising himself that no harm would ever come to this
beautiful angel God had graced him with. And then my
heart pulls a desperate move, it reminds me how I felt
as I held Tony in my arms during his withdrawal, how he sobbed as the sickness
over took his entire body. How I wiped his chin after the nausea would render
him almost infantile.
how I cried with him, telling him that together we
would overcome this. How my
heart ached at the sight of this mighty man, folded
onto himself, willing the whole thing to just go away.
We are a game of poker,
Tony and I. For the past 8 yrs he’s won every round. This time
around he’s been dealt a bad hand. He loses in a major
way. There is no breaking even its no longer just a
game, the realization has set in. Now he panics. The house has come down on him
hard and its time to pay up.
My mind is set, and the
heart
relinquishes the fight because it knows that as much as I
love my man, I love my children beyond anything in the world.
Tony promises that this
separation is good for him, that only the thought of never
having his family can
make him get help. So he goes to his mother’s in
fire of hope, she beckons to him and he goes to her.
Except this time she will not
let the situation get out of her controlling
clutches, she will own him forever or she will let him go to his fate. She uses
a dealer in the Ikkeys Projects, to do her bidding.
Over a deal gone bad, my soul mate, my friend, a part of my essence, is shot in
the head and killed. Left alone, to be found at dawn.
And let me tell you, a slight bit of insanity creeps into your head when you
see the lifeless stare of the father of your kids looking into your eyes as you
go to identify his body.
It's been nine months
since part of my life was shattered, the pain is still
very real and raw. Yet I have little ones who depend on me for their survival.
If Mommy doesn't get it
together and go back to work, then they don't eat.
So pain hides during the
day, it knows if it wants to
come back and feed on my soul it has to let me do the
normal things that will keep us afloat.
Behind closed doors,
when goodnight kisses are given and received, and the look of my babies
sleeping reminds me that yes indeed
there is a God, and oh what a good God he is, pain
comes back. It's vicious tongue licks at my heart like
a parched gazelle to the river. Guilt is pain's associate, they come hand and hand. As pain rapes my heart, guilt sodomizes my soul. A constant reminder that if I had not
left him he
would be at my side now, in this very bed where love
was made, life created and comfort given.
The show must go on
though, so in the morning after my tears have dried, I down a couple of
Tylenols with my coffee to ease the pounding in my head. I shower, paint on my
"happy face", with my M.A.C lipstick, put on my black 4 inch peep
toe’s and spray on my Escada. His
favorite scent on me. My costume complete, my stilettos click their way
to another performance. The tip of my
Knowing
that the day will be too short and that soon enough pain will be having its way
with me again.