Self-Deception

This is the hardest thing that I have ever had to put down in black and white. Not only because I don’t know where to begin, but because inexorable guilt weighs heavy on my conscience. There is no way to gild the lily on this, so I guess I won’t even try.

In all probability, this is the last thing you would have expected from me. I have been thinking… A lot… about the recent past… And I have had more than enough time for reflection upon my own actions.

Now, it fills me with mortification to confess that the only reason I ever was with you was because you resembled him a bit too much. You reminded me of him. Of all that I had lost. I thought… I don’t know really what was I thinking. Or if I was thinking at all then. It all seems a blur, only that it’s lingering on like the ghost of perdition weighing my soul down.

Really, I can’t tell now why I did what I did. Maybe if I hadn’t played you so cruelly, I wouldn’t be here now. And things would have been utterly different. On the other hand, maybe I just couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know, could I have been better off? Will never know mayhaps...

Though I knew it was all wrong because I wasn’t in love with you, I only loved him but we were still together anyway. For reasons I can’t even decide myself. It kept eating at my soul but I just couldn’t back off, couldn’t let go, until it bled..

It was an addiction right from the beginning. An obsession. With him. Were you his doppelgänger?

Every moment spent with you was a betrayal. To you, to me, to him. And that to someone you love is the most hurtful thing ever. Our time together had a virtual touch to it. For while time had taken us far far away, out of each of each other but he never once left my thoughts.

More than anything else, I think I have been in love with the idea of love. To be precise this time around, with you, I just didn’t believe in love. Just couldn’t bring myself to believe in any of that shit. Sorry, if it hurt you but truth has this uncanny knack of twisting it in.

Guess, I had my chance, one more time but it came up on one of the “No Luck”.

Nevertheless, I want you to know, for me it was only him, never anyone else. Although, there are still times when I miss you now but that wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inopportune semblance you hold to him.

The lies I have told you are nothing compared to the lies that I have been telling myself all along… Oh, the lies I have told myself... They ominously loom large on my soul… I have been indulging in the cruel self-deception… Reality comes cashed in barbed wire now…   

For most of the time I was in a drunken haze, in which I was snug. Anytime the fog was about to lift and kick my conscience I cocooned it around me by washing down the happy pills – so conveniently always in my reach… never far away...

I was living in denial, a part of me still is, of what I feel, do, and think. I don’t know why, perhaps because I am afraid. I fear myself, fearful of how I will end up… That I will never find peace now...

One thing I regret today is that I wish someone could have stopped me from all this madness. I fed my obsession for him by using you. Initially, without remorse. Later, I came to hate myself for what I was doing. Every time I was with you, I was scared that one of these days my ugly truth would come unraveling due to the slightest slip, parapraxis.

But you were too trusting and I was too selfish. My egocentricity knew no limits, you just became an unsuspecting victim of my insanity.

Once, in the middle of the hoax my sister almost found out or so I guessed, when she first met you. I believe she cracked the cryptex, almost, when she was shocked to see you until she had a closer look. Which I later covered up with the blatant lie that I wasn’t up to anything devious.

Take my share of a fickle heart,

Mine of a paltry love:

Take it or leave it as you will,

I wash my hands thereof.

I hid the fact that what my sick little mind was up to its twisted tricks; trying to recreate something with you when in my heart I didn’t feel a thing for you. It was absolute indifference. I have played too many games, told too many lies. I am dead on my feet now. Crippled by all that I have done.

Had I gotten the chance I would have gladly gone back to him, any day. In all this turmoil, I don’t know whom I betrayed the most – you, him or myself? I don’t think that I love either of you ever because had I ever loved him, we wouldn’t have been together; and had I ever loved you I would have gotten over him.

Or perhaps, I loved you both. In all honesty, I can’t really tell anymore. You never mattered to me. I should have never let this happen…

Conceivably, I would have kept up the charade much longer if he hadn’t come back. Loyalty is an adherent of whom it originally belonged to. The words fade. I have lied. About everything. All has been a lie… A fabrication of sorts, to manipulate and exploit you to satisfy the hunger inside this haunted heart of mine.

What did I feel? I felt nothing. And that is the most compelling part of the truth.

The exactingly disquieting thing about undisclosed lies is that they have a greater power to ebb us than the ones out in the open. They eat away at your strength, corrode your self-esteem, corrode your very underpinning.

I tried to tell myself I was hurting you, killing myself, making a fiend of myself. But it didn’t help. I was crazed. The minute you came into my life, I knew I was gone.

Often, in the hours of darkness, I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it chases with every step, like an ugly shadow made by my person.

I try to find solace in the fact that confession is not betrayal. What I said or did doesn't matter, only feelings do. If they made me stop loving him that would be an actual betrayal.

It is better to be unfaithful, than faithful without wanting to be. For there to be betrayal, you must first belong, and I did, however, fleetingly. Those moments were elusive, and more so imponderable.

I piece the reality together and it comes out disappointingly. Sometimes, I feel an urge to not exist anymore, which is something I have never felt before ever; and now it comes with such conviction, almost panic. I exonerate him, only after downing magic mushrooms.

Life is a gloomy song about rejection, which beats to the rhythm of my heart day after day: Pursue the Prozac pill road!

I feel ignitable, a wildfire. My soul licking at the gates of an incredibly intricate, personalized, and disturbingly poignant hell, consuming me its raging wrath.

I feel bad about myself for the betrayal I did unto you. My conscience wafts like cinders. I blame myself most brutally.

It is touch that is the most noxious enemy of loyalty with its principles and fetters. By touch I was betrayed and betrayed you... It was an unintentional brushing of fingers, which got laced together, as the tears crept out of my eyes... Your arms around my shoulders in a gesture of reassurance, lying like a robber, who takes, not gives… wants, not offers… who awakes, not pacifies.

Later, it was a deliberate crashing into his arms, as tears flowed like a river, my head buried into his chest… His hand stroking my hair, calming the storm inside me. When one soul is waiting, there is magic in the merest of contacts.

In so many senseless sorrows, love is to blame.

"It was a mistake," you said. But the malevolent thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for hurting you.

The most dreadful pain in the world goes beyond the corporal. Even further beyond any other emotional pain one can feel, it is the betrayal of someone you love. Why did he betray his own heart? I know not.

I think in the end, I stayed with you out of obligation... or maybe comfort, maybe abandon. Maybe you were safe for me, and I needed to feel that. I was terrified of the unknown. But I loved him only. Do you see now, how that didn't work for me? I didn't want to be there simply because you were like him, so I came clean, though it meant breaking our hearts.

My heart now is a black, withered thing, because I betrayed you, and more importantly, I betrayed him. And when I am with him, it feels so bitter getting a kiss for the betrayal.

The failure of love is never really that simple. It involves a grave defeat, a consummate betrayal, buried in a secret, a mass entombment of shared hopes and dreams, existing in a private cemetery – the gates of which always remain shut for others.

When you realize you have betrayed someone, self-loathing hits you. That's the first thing I felt. Then fury and aggravation, followed closely by disappointment and cynicism.

Part of the sticky situation is how little we understand about the ultimate effects and consequences of betrayal on our hearts. At last, betrayal is one of the most dismal story to tell.

Tragedy comes with betrayal, the truest and the greatest tragic failure comes in when you trade in your integrity and fail to treat the other person with the due dignity. When you make the choice to betray another soul, and in turn, give up a part of your own. It haunts you like a dark shadow, refusing to let go.

There was no other way of saving myself, I thought, so I decided to save myself this way. Deep down inside me, I wanted to do it to you, like it was done to me. I didn't give a damn if you suffered because I was suffering inside. All I cared about was myself.

Partly, you are to blame, as well, for letting me do what I did… You gave me that power over you, by giving me full discretion when you said, “I am yours to do what you like”. And I did, for me it was just another love to abuse, to bruise and leave behind. Wish that I had a choice… I wonder if I can really rationalize what I did to you, treat betrayal like a trivial indiscretion of a wayward heart. I wonder if I hurt you and I wonder if I hurt him too. If you can rationalize what I did to you, it’s easy to imagine how he rationalized what he did to me.

We were hooked when we woke,

Our arms intertwined around each other,

But I yearned to resume,

My dreams of another.

In my mind, here in the void, I understand perfectly and wallow in my own misery. But I doubt whether you can. What have I done...