Passing

Yesterday

The biting wind chill blew leaves against my window and the tapping reminded me of the nighttime horror so long ago. Of lying awake in my bed too afraid to move as you climbed up the stairs at the crest of dawn, sniggering under your breath. 

Then the way you lied, two-faced folly, water buffalos in the valley, turned and turned in the aching pain of your soft-bellied heart, rotted from the inside. Hypocrisy burns on your tongue, empathy a shortened post outside an abandoned ballroom, where you have left the performance behind but memorized the routine. 

Where the small non-empathetic happenings walked the line to conceal how you truly saw people as tools, love as transactional. That you got all the pleasure of enacting your revenge fantasies in the style of the pettiest, unrefined artist. 

Today

But even after all the control, manipulation, and fear, who I am has not eroded away to one hundred-year molded trash trapped at the bottom of a landfill. 

Tomorrow

Time passes and I am happy and I forget you like a bad dream.