Souta. My name.

I would have forsaken it too with my last name, but I don't care much about it. It doesn't bother me enough to bother with trying to sort out some other thing people might call me. They call me many things. Monster. Demon. Scum. My favorite one is murderer, but in our realm... Our side of the world, that is normal. I believe people are just dramatic.

Then there is her. The cute bloody red eyes, the flaring temper that bristles up at the first notion of rejection and the white eyelashes, brows, and hair that make her look pure. She could practically blend in with snow.

Oh, I desire her so. I covet her! I want to squeeze her cheeks in my palms, but I find myself pressing my fingers in tightly till she cries. I was to kiss her lips, but my teeth are sinking into her flesh, tearing in for a taste - a bite - as she makes me wanton for treats, but I think her flesh is all the better.

No, sweet Julie of mine.

Sweet.

Sweet Julie.

Silly, foolish girl.

Promising me her eternity.

She is my possession.

Mine to covet, mine for all time until the end of time.

If only she didn't run. Why did he have to try to escape me?

I found her first again, nearly eighty years later. Beautiful. Pristine. Her womanly body so different now to that of her more girlish figure when we first met. Yes. Mine again! My thoughts were rampant, hungry and desired to feast on the thing that I had not held in so long. I thought I might squeeze her tighter when I caught her first as she tried to run away till she cried. I thought her bones were about to pop!

The blubbered moan, the whine of pain and then her hands gripping my arms that tightened around her waist till she was coughing and sputtering, gagging and choking while banging on my arms.

"Let me go!"

Oh, the terror in her voice. Sheer, unadulterated terror.

My Hunger thrumming wildly within me, screaming at me to chain her up. To shackle her and keep her safe so she could not get away again. But I let her go, knowing she was all too cute and too beautiful when I gave into the chase.

The long flow of wavy white bouncing, the desperate pants and labored breathes as she willed herself to run faster, nearly breaking her ankle as she flung herself down the steps. Oh, but I chased. I chased on. I was walking here, sometimes there, running at other times and laughing as she ran from me. It was a joy to my ears. I adored it so.

Please, run for me more dear, sweet Julianna.

Oh, won't you be mine?

I could squeeze you till you stop breathing.

I know you'd come back to life again.

I know that kind of death is only temporary.

Yes.

Oh, beautiful, sweet, alluring Julie.

You are mine.

Narcissists love couples’ counseling. Oh, God, how they love it. It’s a GAME to them. They LOVE it. Narcissists play marriage counselors like fiddles. They dance circles around them, flick them in the backs of their heads without them even knowing, laugh at them, dance hellish jigs of mockery on their shoulders and tops of their skulls; inwardly, secretly, covertly laughing their asses off in mockery of just about all marriage counselors on earth.

Seated next to their long-suffering and earnestly-trying-to-make-things-work codependent every-spouse, what goes through the head of a narcissist while she or he looks right into the face of the also-earnest marriage counselor is something like this: “You think I’m here to make things BETTER between myself and this piss-ant SLAVE I’ve lassoed? Ha-HAA! Not a chance! But this is WONDERFUL ATTENTION I’m getting from the BOTH of you along the way! I’m LOVING this! How long can we keep this going?? This is DELICIOUS ATTENTION!!”

And I’m sorry to report, much to the chagrin of the modern radical feminists out there, that nowadays there is TREMENDOUS advantage to being a FEMALE narcissist. It’s not just me saying that—during my dark abyss of cumulative CPTSD, when the narc had very nearly driven me to death—but when I hit rock bottom and—praise to God—bounced and began my recovery from codependency—I paid some of the most well-spent money I’ve ever spent to a female narcissistic-abuse-recovery life coach, and even though “her narc” had been a demon-possessed male, she too stated her belief that nowadays, in our current political climate, female narcs can get away with forms of abuse that, had a male narc did that, then society would have been on to them.

Going to couples’ counseling with that demon-possessed narcissistic witch that had initially parasitized me was far worse than doing no counseling at all. Far worse. For the witch mirrored and shmoozed every single counselor from the get-go: She charmed them with cajoleries and by demonically, hypnotically mirroring their own words and body language back on them. The demon inhabiting “my narc” could “get on the good side” of just about anybody in seconds, unless it was somebody who was very well versed in the facts of narcissistic personality disorder and very probably demonic possession, as well, and it turns out that most marriage counselors THINK that they know a thing or two about NPD, because they’ve probably been introduced to it for a couple or three measly weeks while getting their psych degree, but as probably ALL narcissistic-abuse survivors know: Unless you have lived it yourself, you don’t know jack shit about NPD abuse.

But the thing that makes it so advantageous to be a FEMALE narc in today’s modern, crumbling, gynocentric society is that BOTH idiot sides of the political spectrum will rush to the defense of a female who claims to be a victim nowadays—BOTH—and narcs, as all survivors of narc abuse know—are the undisputed MASTERS at playing the victim. And so today, any therapist who is inherently “left-leaning” will jump to the defense of a female narc who is feigning victimhood by claiming that “Oh, whoa is me: He’s oppressing me!”; and any therapist who is “right-leaning” will jump to the defense of a female narc who is feigning victimhood by claiming that “Oh, whoa is me: I’m a poor damsel in distress!”

The narc could read these fools in an instant, whichever side of the political spectrum upon which they fell, by asking a few strategic, probing questions (which is how she initially fooled this fool before you now), then she would simply put on an act, becoming that likeminded left-leaning or right-leaning sympathetic, simpatico person, and she would find out the likes and values of that particular counselor and she would adopt them for her own, and she would then also begin mimicking the actual physical mannerisms of each counselor from across his or her desk, and it was just like that hypnotic python hypnotizing Mowgli in THE JUNGLE BOOK. Except the one being squeezed was me.

Squeezed and triangulated: Narcs are also virtuosos at triangulating people: getting others to line up with the narc, to agree with them, and to team up with the narc against their isolated-and-psych-abused victim, the codependent primary supply of any narc.

She did this to me each and every time we ever went to marriage counseling.

And stupid me: I was so damnably codependent, I was so housebroken, and just BROKEN by the demon in the fleshly hull of that parasitized woman’s body, that I was practically crying out to counselors to get it into that witch’s head: that if this marriage was going to WORK, then I actually needed some kind of nano-particularate of INTIMACY and affection from her (it). I choke and cough now as I type that; I am horrified and ashamed; I was actually wanting to get closer to a demon!

And the counselor, whichever counselor, would always have some new gimmick, some new trick up his or her sleeve, some new couples’ game that we should play that next week that would act as a magical catalyst to beget intimacy between the narc and myself. And the narc would always play along and feign earnestness (and inwardly laugh her ass off and smirk her narcissistic smirk) and then, later that week, when I tried to play the stupid game and prayerfully initiate some kind of intimacy with the narc, then the narc would vanish, would disappear, would suddenly have have something super-compelling that she just had to do in the other room, and if I went to help her in the other room then her sudden all-compelling thing to do had shifted to another room, and another room, and another house, or better still, another community do-gooder activity in the community (my ex-wife was a lousy, rotten COMMUNAL narc). And when we’d meet again the next weekend and the counselor would say, “How did it go, you two?” and I would try to plead for help, try to explain that she refused to play the magical intimacy-initiating game, that she had REFUSED to play, then the counselor would ask for an explanation from the narc, and the narc would….wait for it….vomit out the WORD SALAD.

Every narcissistic-abuse survivor knows about the Word Salad. Word Salad is a bit like when a squid shits out INK to confuse a predatory assailant, to obstruct the assailant’s vision, and thereby to give the squid time to get away. A Word-Salad “answer” is when you ask a narcissist a question that might put the narcissist on the spot, and the narcissist gives an answer that has many, many words in it, but strangely, bafflingly, there is no actual answer in it. It’s squid’s ink. Like everything else a narcissist does, giving a Word-Salad answer to an earnest, probing, uncomfortable question requires a great deal of demonic subtlety. A Word-Salad answer is ultimately a non-sequiter, but it needs to skirt close enough to the topic of the question so as to not be a complete non-sequiter, and it must consist of many, many more words than necessary in order to wear down the listener who posed the question, as well as to confuse him or her and thereby make them go away or make them change the subject.

And so the narc would shit the Word-Salad answer out of her subtle mouth, and it would work its subtle, demonic magic upon the inquiring counselor: It would stun and confuse him or her and would get them to drop the subject and to move on to something else that didn’t suddenly render them so confused.

And in this way I never had any intimacy or affection from my wife in all those nightmarish years of NPD marital abuse. Which is ultimately a blessing, because once, when I later saw her eyes go all black again—but for a full eight or nine seconds THAT time—and when I SAW the fucking demon manifest in her face as well THAT time, then yeah, I’m pretty much glad I did not kiss that fucking creature too much or too often after the initial, fleeting narcissistic-lovebombing phase was over.

It will come as no surprise that I agree with our friend Arthur Schopenhauer: "Love is just the instinct of Sex." And just what does that mean?

Firstly, Schopenhauer argues in the Metaphysics of Love that love is NOT an illusion--though perhaps it might be perceived as "ghost." It is a Truth existing because people have made it so throughout history. (Same as God exists a priori because we know the term.) I agree.

Second, he considers Love as fundamentally transcendent. This is the point at which he expresses: "Every kind of Love, however ethereal it may seem, springs entirely from the instinct of sex," and it is worthwhile to quote further: "Indeed, it [Love] is absolutely this instinct, only in a more definite, specialised and perhaps strictly speaking, more individualized form." After all, we are speaking of single units, not generic categories of humanity: man/woman. And again, I agree.

Schopenhauer specifies that Love focuses on the Next. The instinct centers on, quite simply, the will to Live: individually, and as a species. He contrasts this with an interesting counterpoint: if a man and a woman dislike each other, they can only bring into the world "unhappy being" ---whether in their own existence or in that of the Next. I disagree...

Here, I pause to reflect personally. Confusion and self-deception led my parents to each other; contempt within themselves drove them apart; and my father concluded that he had to suffer my mother, to have me in his life-- driving home the point that we do not know what is Next, we are merely compelled towards it. Our instinct may seem faulty, but the Universe is never wrong. The future merely IS, and we are in no position to agree or disagree. (*Arthur should know better as he published The Metaphysics of Love in 1851, and before in 1841 his Essay on the Freedom of Will.)

Which leads us finally to the metaphysical part of Love... that the instinct of the sexes need not result in anything physical, but rather an idea, and even better an Ideal. For that the noble hearted will expend considerable self-sacrifice... For personal honor.

(*Poor Arthur though is dire in his final condemnation of Love, noting that the stealthy "glances of longing" belie an underlying knowledge that lovers are "striving to perpetuate all this misery and turmoil [of Existence] that would otherwise come to a timely end." Mentally as much as Physically. )

Moving on to the rest of this challenge question: I've never cheated on anyone, nor been cheated on... That is in my case an impossibility, intellectually, as I begin with an understanding of our detachment physically from this reality. We belong to the Earth, which will bury us as we are, and what more positive sentiment we might cultivate in the mean time benefits the world as a whole, now and later. Some people couple easily, corporeality being no barrier in action. Would I be upset if my partner slept around? Yes and No. I would see it as a failing of Character; not as a personal offense. For myself, casual sex is an abhorrent waste, not worth the risk of what might be "leftover." My own sense of integrity, i.e. personal attachment, is too strong when it comes to commitment of the Soul, which I do believe carries on (as a worthy Next). I feel no need to "get over" my emotional attachments, nor do I try to-- I see these as forever imprinted on Universal memory. And I do think that's pretty sexy.

Petra slammed her foot on the brakes. There had been something that just seemed to have dashed right across the road. She was not sure what that thing was, or whatever it could have been. But then she ended up losing control of the wheel from the slippery surface of the tarmacked road.

To her horror, she realized what was going on. Her brakes were malfunctioning! She continued to slide across the road, past whatever it was that had ended up causing her to lose control of her vehicle.

Her heart raced within her chest. She had forgotten to pay attention to the traffic signals, and speed limit signs. Here she was trying to drive at about a 120 kilometers per hour, thinking she would be able to manage coming to a stop whenever she needed to.

The gods must have been testing her driving abilities. She tried her brakes one more time.

They still failed her. She began to scream as her vehicle veered off the side of the road, and headed toward a Baobab tree.

She covered her face, and braced for impact. The front part of her car slammed into the thick bark of the Baobab tree, and to make things worse, the entire windscreen shattered into a zillion nano shards of glass.

After a short while, smoke started to billow from the car. Petra had been out of it from the moment of the impact, but the odor of the smoke that surrounded her made her feel queasy.

She felt as if she was going to collapse from the lack of oxygen. Her whole body was in a lot of pain, and to make things worse, she was stuck inside her car!

Luckily for her another car was not too far behind her, and a random stranger ran out of his car to her aid. He was not sure how to save her, and his feet just sprang to action.

Petra had seen a figure with wings approaching her. She began to freak out and thought to herself, "No...I am not ready to go with you, Azrael...please, give me some more time to live and celebrate Nowruz with my family."

The car burst into flames.

Petra screamed.

The flutter of wings in the distance made her calm down...for a bit.

A hand tapped her on her shoulder, "Are you alright, Miss?"

Petra smiled. There was a beautiful scent now in the air that was like a sweet smelling fragrance of her Habibi's.

The young gentleman smiled back. He stared at the lady, and felt his heart skip a beat. She was beautiful, and he was glad to have saved her from dying in an inferno.

Petra coughed, and then replied, "Yes, I am. Thank you for saving me...my dear guardian angel."

The guy chuckled. "My pleasure."

#AngelofDeath. (c)

1 Aprile, 2023.

https://youtu.be/sDEWZnPJGRU

“Hello, my name is Andrew Garrison, and I’m an alcoholic,” I said to the room of defeated faces that formed a circle around me. The man at the other end, with the spectacles, crossed legs, and rosary dangling over his hairy chest, said, “Thank you, Andrew, we’re all happy to have you here.” No, they weren’t.

“Is there anything you’d like to say? Any thoughts you might have? This is a judgment-free room,” the rosary man said.

“I don’t want forgiveness or nothing like that.” I answered. “I ain’t here because I want this room to convince me that I’m not what I am. Because I’m not confused about that.”

“Very well, Andrew. You can continue.” I disliked this man. The smile told me he thought he was above me. That he believed he was the puppet master of this room. Controlling a bunch of sinners who were looking up at rock bottom, because it was easy, because they were already defeated.

“My daughter died. She was only three months old. I was drinking heavily. I passed out on the couch while my ex-wife was at work. I placed her on my chest, and I came to with the sound of Helen screaming, as she grabbed Annie, who was lying face down on the carpet floor next to the couch. She wasn’t breathing.”

I paused to see if the rosary man was going to interject, but he didn’t say a word. Just waved a hand at me to signify that it was okay to continue. That no one was judging me, even though their faces told a different tale.

“I bet you’d think that something like that would make me put the bottle down? Well, it did, for a little while. But when Helen left, and I lost my job at the refinery, I couldn’t stand reality, you know? The thought of it. The thought of clear consciousness made my skin crawl. And eventually I found myself roaming the streets at night, fighting with myself.”

“What was the fight about, Andrew?”

“The fact that I couldn’t come up with one single reason to not shove a gun down my throat.”

“Well, you’re still with us. Among the living. So, what changed your mind?”

“A bar. Tom’s Bar. I would sit there, me and the rest of the disenfranchised. Silently having the same conversations inside our head. Well, maybe there’s weren’t quite as bad as mine, but they still had their shit, ya know? Their regrets. Anyway, one of them, this guy named Reggie, he’s a small skinny little thing, shaped like a twig. He says, he says, that uh, his sister, her name was Margie, I think, works down at the River Run diner off of Water. Anyway, he says that her man has been laying beatings on her, something awful right. Reggie says that every Wednesday they get together for a game of cards, a few beers, and just to talk about life and shit. So, he tells me, well, he tells whoever’s listening, that she comes over to his place on Wednesdays, all bruised up. One week it’s a shiner, the next it’s on her forearms, her legs, then on one of these Wednesdays, she asks if she can take a shower. Reggie says, yeah sure, no problem. So when he hears the water running, he peeks in. He tells the guys that he ain’t no pervert, or incest, or whatever, but he just wanted to see what it was she was hiding, you know?. He sees her back, and man, he said he nearly dropped dead. There were scratch marks from the top of her back to the bottom. Bite marks, scars, you name it, it was there. So he says, Wendy, this is the final straw. I’m going to go over there and beat his head in. You know what she says?”

“No, I don’t.” The rosary man said. “No, but don’t stop. Please, continue.” Again, he waves his hand in my direction, and I want to go over there and break it off. But I try not to dwell, because my thoughts get all jumbled when that rage takes over, and I want to finish my story.

“She tells him that Reggie will have to kill him. Plain and simple, because if he doesn’t, he’ll kill her. So, it’s either let it alone. Let fucking bygones be bygones or whatever, or go all the way.”

Then this lady, about fifty or so years old, scratching at her wrists, timidly raises her hand like we’re in grade school, and asks. “Well, why didn’t she just go to the cops?”

“That’s a good question. That’s what Reggie asks her too, you see? He says, Wendy, I’ll drive you down to the sheriff’s office right now, and we’ll put the prick away. But she says no. She actually laughs. Not a, this is a funny situation laugh, but a Reggie, how could you be so naïve laugh.”

The 50-year-old woman raises her hand again. “Why did she laugh?” She doesn’t make eye contact with me. She stares at her shoes as she asks.

“Well, she laughs because of society, right? This man, this man, is a pillar of the community. A stand-up guy, you know? Donates to charity, volunteers at the soup kitchen. He’s a reverend down at the Holy Cross too, or at least he was. A man of God. And she says that she was born into a white trash family and lived her life in a trailer park. So she says, what would the sheriff say? The man, who is a personal friend of her boyfriends, what would he say if a trailer trash girl from a trailer trash family tried to condemn a pillar of the community? Well, he’d laugh in her face is what he would do.”

“That ain’t right, man. That ain’t right at all,” A young black man to my right said, and I just nod my head. It isn’t right at all. “This guy should get a bullet in his head.”

“You couldn’t be more right,” I said, as I looked at the man with the rosary. “My daughter died, and nothing will bring her back, but maybe I can balance the world again by getting rid of a piece of shit.” I stood up, pulled the .38 from the back of my pants, and shot the rosary man twice in the head.

Then I turned around and walked out of the meeting, as the circle screamed.