let Her sleep

Walking isn’t peaceful anymore. Each step is a syllable marching forward through some remembered story. It feels like an addiction, this retelling. It’s how I feel when someone describes a particularly flavorful beer or a perfectly balanced whiskey. After months of blissful indifference I want it, suddenly and immediately, transfused and coursing through my veins. Even though I know, I know, that it will pull me apart me from the inside out, chomping at the liver and love I’ve been working so hard to heal.
step, step, step.
In these old stories I am a cursed villain or a stumbling idiot. A naive child or a crook caught red-handed. In more than one, the village laughs with mocking disdain that I, mistakenly, take for sincere glee.
ha, ha, ha.
It is not until later, until the inevitable dissection, that I realize my error.
My ignorance and my mistakes—they are the things I wish to flush from my system. But the toxic slurry of loathing I am pumping in to take its place kills indiscriminately. It might rid me of my shame, but is it worth my softness?

Regardless,
for fear of waking Memory, I tread lightly.