Fairy tale

The three bears. The big bad wolf. The hare. All the villains are here. To judge a pageant of victims. Beautiful criminals of the other sort. Chewed. Digested and shite out as something else. Stories she would tell herself, in the middle of drinking. In the judgement between sobriety and sleep. Words she could manipulate to change how she grieved for them. How she organised her grief. Into rigid compartments. Brief addictions to each person that had led to one long term relationship with her own loneliness.

She saw it as a kind of poverty. A form of working poorness. Everything she had earned handed back to the struggle. A false insurance policy that denied her need for care.

She drew in pen. On the backs of papers she'd not read. Advertisements sent to some thriving person they presumed inhabited her world. She wrote letters. A cacophony of metaphors she never sent. Little doses of the cure she knew was looking for her. As she continued her flirtations with the disease.

She was still the same person. And a different one. There is change in repetition. The freedom of addiction making everything clear. It's splendid to be hopeless.

The villains are always on hand. The victims always ready to fail. Life is a fairy tale. Because just when you've rebuilt it, there's always someone there to blow your house down.