I've been thinking about her this week. Well, thinking about him, and putting myself in his place, in which case I would be thinking about her. What's she like? Like me. Exactly like me. Exactly like me, but better. What would that be like? If she knew everything I knew and had experienced everything I experienced except then somehow … gotten over some things? Leapt gracefully (gazellelike?) over them, left the shards and tatters behind, not looked back. Or learned helpful lessons from other things, things I blew past too quickly to notice that I could have internalized, cherished, nourished myself with. She'd be nourished. I'm convinced that she is better emotionally, which is funny because most of my conscious self-improvement campaigns involve me being better physically. But for me this is an effort; for her it would be effortless. She would have naturally perfect vision, perfect hearing; nobody loves knowing what I think I saw and what I think I heard, like listening to someone's dreams, filled with unspecified meaning. She would actually enjoy exercise, be flexible, have firmer muscles, greater endurance. Once a man who was dating a better version of me was drunk at a party and held me not-quite briefly, his lips at my ear exclaimed in wonder "You're so soft, so soft" and it sounded good but he'd left me for her and I therefore think the better version of me is hard. She would only say out loud the things she was going to do and then she would do them. She would remember what people said, as I do, and she would remember to water the plants, pay the bills, empty the trash, put away the laundry. She would write letters on paper because they're worth more, and her hands wouldn't cramp after just one, because she'd be in the habit. She would read books instead of the news, because she would know that the news only makes her sad. She'd welcome the seasons as they arrive instead of going into them kicking and screaming, loving them only as they are fading, wasting half of one mourning the loss of the last. She would cook better, but she would eat less because she wouldn't use food as a substitute for affection. She would know how to do things because she wouldn't waste time being angry that she couldn't already; she'd note the ignorance and rectify it. She would have already written this. She would be exactly like me, except more like what you want. She would be so done with pleasing you. 

In a way you had to do it the way you did because that’s what the story said, it is what was written down for you like a script you had to follow. It started with a betrayal, yours. You betrayed your mother, already destroyed by her own desires and inaccessible to you in most ways for as long as you could remember. Your brother, his dumb brutish strength always a threat to you; he always apologized, he never meant it, it always left a scar and the scars are the least of it. Your father, his ego, his posturing as he pretended to be the father to you both, the man of the house, king of the tale. It didn’t feel like betrayal because you’d never felt you were on the same side as any of them, but family is blood and blood is thick and flows in one direction, and any other direction makes you a traitor.

The sample sentence for the word “betrayal” in the online dictionary is “the betrayal of the king by his daughter” so like I’m saying, this is the story. Not your story but the one everyone tells, and you were just living it out.

The red rope coiled around your waist is a symbol of something, your virginity or the loss of it, your womanhood or the tricks you learned that came along with it. Tie one end around your own wrist, one around his. Now you are married. Now he will love you and fight for you. He walks away so that he can come back. You’ve told the secret you weren’t supposed to know and now he’ll take the secret and go and find more. Follow the thread. He is lost in his own story for a moment, the tug on your wrist tells you he’s far away, but he can’t come back except to you. Your heart pounds behind your eyelids. If you press your palms against your eyes you can see the blood, bursting blooms, it’s looking past a veil into a future that is the only part of the story that is unclear to you. It’s unclear to me, too, though I know how I want it to end.

He kills your brother. He escapes; that part we all know. He betrays you. There is no version of the story where these things do not happen, no matter how gently told.

The thing is you can’t even be mad. You started it. You have destroyed your home and your family for love and the love was not returned and now you have to destroy yourself. You know this to be true; you know that after you do something so terrible that nobody can forgive you, you have to forgive yourself or destroy yourself, and you don’t know if you can forgive yourself. You spin in circles, madness, despair, the usual. The red rope still tied around your waist and wrist, frayed where you had thought you held him fast to you. Sad torn red rope, wrapping more tightly around you as you spin.

I’m putting myself into your story here. This is where I’m going to show up. Here on a hilltop as you watch the black-sailed ship he came in sail away towards the horizon, the ship that should have carried you away from your shame. Interestingly, both your rope and his ship are logic puzzles. His means: if you replace an element and another element and another element from a whole, when does it stop being a whole. Yours means: try all the available paths.

“Sit down,” I tell you. As if in a dream you take my presence for granted, thump down on the grass. Why are you spinning, why are you tearing out your hair, why are you sad? Because you thought you had love and you didn’t. But this is not a loss. Loss is something you don’t want to get over, because loss is a sweet pain; in this case you are crying over something you never had. Not from your mother, your father, your brother, and not from this man. Cry for what you’ve never had. You can cry and cry and cry until there’s no tears left in your body to cry, until all the tissues in the world have held all the tears you cried and been turned into tiny tufts of ripped salt-soaked paper. Go ahead and cry, honey. But when you’re done, in the version of the story I want to tell you, in the version of the story I want you to believe, when you are done crying for what you never had, you will have room to accept more than you dared to want.

You can take the rope and hang yourself, if you want. You can find your brother’s body and curl between his dead arms, cold and no longer capable of hurting you. Or you can leave the rope behind, call the puzzle solved, find yourself amazing, laugh instead of cry, step into your name, most holy and older than time. You can dance with me, sparkle with joy, crown yourself with future constellations. You can do whatever you want.

Poor unloved one, I've been thinking about you this week. Red-headed and unwanted, or rather wanted until. Wanted until you weren't, until the golden child came along, relatively perfect, whereupon you were backstoried into a hatefulness or at least an unlikeableness that extended well before your decision-making ability. Kicking so hard in the womb, she said, as if you'd honestly known what was going on outside and had the agency to respond. She certainly didn't like you very much, did she? You hadn't done anything good or bad, it says so in the story, but still she was set against you. Over the years you learned somehow to forgive the one who took your place. Who wouldn't give you food because you were hungry but traded what you probably thought was hyperbole. A birthright for a bowl of beans, and not even magic beans. Of course you didn't mean it. Clutching at your heels from the start, that one, always trying to squeeze past you or to at least take whatever was rightfully yours from your hands before the shadow even crossed your palms. Not their doing, and so you forgive them. Her doing, you said for years, her justifications, her impersonations, her clever tricks. But in the end it was the loss of the love you thought was yours that stung the most. It should have been yours; the corn, the wine, the blessing, the love. Sorry, he said, I already gave it away. Nothing for me, you wailed, and the answer was nothing. Years of resentment for that, but then you went on to build your own kingdom, if only to prove that you never needed theirs. After all why should you ever have it easy? And this does seem to be the point, that you don't get given what you can get for yourself. My contemporary concept of fair was spun much later, from finer wool. I was telling your story to my friend who looked at me in disbelief. But surely no parent, she said, surely no loving parent. Surely not. I understand her disbelief; after all from such seeds sprang the roots of my own lack of faith. Surely no loving parent, and why be loyal to one who so clearly doesn't love us very much, if at all? Your story continues elsewhere; I hope you found a happier ending than a cave, or that before the cave there was a woman or two who nestled against the soft cushion of you, loved you for the man you became, and helped you put aside the people you were never going to be good enough for, anyway. I'd wish that for anyone. 

This is the one about you, finally, the one you keep waiting for me to write. The one in which I lay bare my heart, the whole story. I begin at the beginning with the richness of detail you've come to expect when wading through all the words that are not about you, and finally the details are delicious to you because finally they are about you, finally you see yourself reflected in the mirror I am holding up to you, again, the mirror of me. And I am invisible when I'm looking at you, which is how you prefer me, as it affords a better view of you. From the beginning we progress forward, chronologically and logically and I'd make a pun about crones but I know this doesn't interest you so never mind. Never never mind. How I do keep creeping in but yes, this is the one about you that you've clearly been so impatiently waiting for. The one where I reveal all the secrets about you, and though the secrets are in my heart which I think makes them mine they are of course yours, about you, these tender dears. Are you paying attention? It's okay, you don't have to pay attention to me, but this is the one I am writing about you, so you should pay attention to this. You should feel like you're going to be rewarded. For all the times I spoke and you listened in the hopes of hearing your own name come from my mouth, all the times I wrote and you read it and hoped to see your name, here it is: your name. A description of your face, your eyes, how the vulnerable spaces near the bone hold the light and naturally my attention. There, doesn't that feel nice. I expect it feels nice to have someone's attention entirely directed at you, their words repeating back what you've said so that you know they were listening, their eyes reflecting back what they see so that you know you've been seen, their hands touching the parts of you that most wish to be touched and asking nothing in return so that you know they were only ever thinking about you. Listen I get greedy too sometimes, I'm not saying it's wrong. I will talk about your skin, the alignment of limbs, the sinew and muscle, the beauty of you, I will even tell the story of how it felt to touch you even if that only or mostly occurred in my imagination. This is the one about you and I want you to have the full experience. I am telling it all, about the nights I woke up weeping or sometimes though less frequently laughing from the middle of dream about you. This is the one where I tell you what that dream was about, how the tears (or, albeit less frequently, the laughs) pulled me from that dream and caught the glinting light of the whole day. In this one, the one you've been waiting for, the one that is all about you, I tell my version of the story of us except it is the story of you to you, and you rest your finger against your chin and read each word and continue to wait to see the whole truth and feel whatever it is you expect to feel when I finally stop fucking around in my own feelings and reflections and get to the very important part that is all about you. That part is coming. It's here. That was it.

Cinderella's stepsister lowers her feet into a bath of Epsom salts, watches the blood rising in the warm salt water in thin red tendrils, feels the itch of the beginning of healing. Presses her palms against her cried-out eyes, the gray explosions of pressure behind her eyelids. All I wanted was to be what you wanted, she whispers to the empty room. 

"Another rough day at work, dear?"

She didn't know the half of it, he thought. Absolutely punishing. It had seemed like such a good idea to switch from freelance to corporate, break free of his father's hand-to-mouth style, have a regular job. And the corporation seemed reasonable: test the new equipment, report back. He was lean and hungry then, ready to make an impression. And she was so supportive, working the swing shift until he got off the ground. World ahead of them. Years ago. And today was just another day of trying his damnedest and coming close and failing. It's like the world is rigged against him. Like it always has been. 

He remembers, she remembers, when they started. My father was a trickster, he'd told her, a con man. Curled together in their cozy den, planning the future in his voice that came from a class above hers, telling her how he was a genius, and he'd use his smarts and cunning to feed the family they would have, instead of to pull the wool over the eyes of sheeple. It seemed like a good plan. But then every evening's dinner was presided over by another long howl about how hard he tried, how he wanted nothing more than to provide for his family, how he just couldn't catch a break. His eyes wild in the way that only a trapped animal's can be. In the beginning she agonized for him, she literally cried for him; it's not fair what is happening to you, she said. It's not fair. You're doing everything right, by the book.

And now years later and nothing has changed. They'd starve if not for her. He's out failing to catch the skinniest bird for the umpteenth year and she's getting plump chickens from the henhouse, lambs from the fields. She's a sleek and lovely hunter, biting their necks before they can even cackle or bleat out a warning, sliding their blood-slick still warm bodies onto the dinner plate that he complains over, how he was passed over for another promotion, another dynamite plan gone wrong. Hmmm, she says, and looks at him thoughtfully. He still calls himself the breadwinner, as if they ever ate or wanted bread. 

When did her empathy turn to pity, when did the pity turn to disgust? At what moment did she understand that he was so deep in the habit of failure that he wouldn't know what to do with success if it caught him. Does it matter? Here they are now; her exhaustion, his endless loop of defeat. Beep beep.