"I won't be the villain in your stories any more." I said, as the midnight waves crashed against the shore and we shivered in the moonlight, his arm draped over my stiff shoulders. It was strange how brutally cold it was, yet we were both somehow pretending it was worth it.
"You were never the villain." He replied softly, gazing out across the dark swelling sea, as if he'd find the right words dancing along the horizon line. Then he turned, his arctic eyes fixed upon mine, and I looked up at him expectantly. With the utmost sincerity he could muster, he looked at my lips and murmured;
"More like the saviour."
And with a cross between a snort and a choke, I burst out laughing in his stupid fucking face.
And that's when I knew that I was free.
*
Everything I am today has grown from the ways I've butchered myself to be enough for the men I have loved.
It's a fact that kills me to acknowledge, yet I must confront if I ever wish to heal. And boy, was he one of them. Not just someone that I loved, but someone that entirely owned me, mind, body and soul. The puppet master. He knew exactly how to make me fall at his knees and he did not hesitate to use that to the full extent of his power. He was not the first to break my heart, nor would he be the last. But he somehow seemed the most profound. Unlike any of the others, his was a love I could not shake, that clung to me like frost, slowly sucking the warmth and life out of me.
The problem was, we gave each other everything we always wanted. He, a philosopher returning to a country that had forgotten him with nothing but a troubling alcohol dependency and a light suntan. I, a doe-eyed dreamer younger than her age but older than her years, with a desperation to feel special so blinding, it completely obscured the truth of sad, predatory soul-sucker who adopted the guise of a mysterious creature that would attack anyone who came close, except for one.
And that is all I would ever be. The greatest thing I could ever deem myself to be in his eyes was the exception to the rule. He could have just crushed me like an ant between his fingertips. But why would you, when an ant is such a diligent worker? Instead of crushing me, he saw first what I could offer him. And the only accolade I had was I think I surprised him. I had more to give than he imagined. What I never realised until that night on the moonlight beach 4 years after our last meeting, was all these years I'd been providing him the one thing he sought more than anything, more than sex, more than love, more than dedication;
To be viewed as the person he so desperately wanted to believe he was.
While my loving hand was outstretched, ready to give and receive openly, he'd only ever slip his fingers between mine when no-one was looking, tugging me further away from the light and guiding me into the shadows.He was the one that took the innocent complexities that I'd only begun to discovered in myself and branded his name across them. He stole the things about myself I slowly began to love and understand and explore and suddenly they belonged to him, to a point where I was no longer sure if I wanted to be his, or simply be him. It's so easy to fall for a man so in love with himself, as a girl is taught that there's no greater way to be accepted than to concede.
But his was not the only poisonous love I have felt in my time, not by a long shot. And I'd spent an entire girlhood believing it was my weakness and vulnerability to blame, rather than the overbearing predatory desires of toxic men. Nearly every man that I have loved has tried to knock me down enough to wrap his chains around my independence. Nearly every man I have met who has perceived my brightness as a threat to their own, has actively tried to dim mine to make space for theirs.
And it has took me 25 fucking years of stunted growth and delayed epiphanies and lengthy healing processes to finally look up into the eyes of my puppet master and slash through the thin silvery threads that still glistened around my wrists.
In that moment I transcended. I stepped out of the shell of a girl bruised and broken from years of neglect and torment and control at the hands of man, and flexed my muscles with my newfound strength. At that moment everything I had ever been, and everything I have the potential to become collided in one seismic ripple in spacetime that altered my future irrevocably. I looked down to see divine wisdom flowing from my fingertips like static electricity, and my soul became fluid, ebbing and flowing through my physical form like treacle, churning and throbbing with feminine power to the rhythm of the tides. I was every wronged female, every lost girl, every broken ex-girlfriend, and the last scorned woman. And as the stars aligned above in the night sky and mother moon bathed every curve and angle of my face in her ethereal glow, I knew I'd finally found what I’ve been looking for my entire life.
The woman to defend the girl who couldn't defend herself.
The parts of me that had been scattered to the wind were finally being called home. And I knew then that every person who had ever taken from me, was going to pay.
A few weeks later, I awoke unexpectedly late in the day to find dusk pressing heavy on my eyelids. I went to the window to see our street below, doused in an otherworldly orange glow. There were no people. The cars were motionless. Twilight had fallen during the day.
It was the day that the aptly named hurricane Ophelia clawed her way through the sky and tore the sand from the Sahara Desert, shaking it out across Western Europe. It was the Friday the 13th of October. A supposedly cursed day, in the month of the 25th year of my birth, the month of Halloween, when decades ago my grandmother had born my blood line into this world. There was something feverish in the air that day, and I wrote two lines on a piece of paper.
The air is ripe beneath the amber sun, I wrote. The season of the witch has just begun. It was the start of our 13th song.
I never fully understood how I was going to get my justice, until we wrote Voodoo.
I've spent years writing essays on this blog, and while sending out each sentiment allowed me a certain sense of release, there was something darker I sought. Something a little like vengeance. I couldn’t let something ago until justice balanced the hurt. My words were as good as whispers when written. I needed to yell, and I needed to be heard.
The dirt is dry beneath their fingernails, I wrote, a shallow grave is deeper than anything they’ve done.
Something changed when music was added to these words. With a thundering slippery bassline and pounding drums, the words came to life, no longer a series of static marks and shapes that attempt to emulate a human feeling. But real, gut-wrenching, teeth-gritting reality. With noise, I could take the feeling out of my chest and belt them into the heart of those hearing it. It was as good as witchcraft, every song we wrote becoming black magic propelled out through my vocal chords in a buffer of sound, weaving and dodging through the fabric of reality to seek the one for whom it was destined.
The stars above they seem to whisper to you, a secret that they all know to be true. An evil lies between your parted lips, turning hurt into a weapon, with the power of voodoo.
As we sat on that beach and I watched his expression melt from disappointment into a muted kind of anger, the power and magic he thieved from me began to slowly seep from his pores, leaking out across the pebbles. And it was this power that I took back, and weaved into a curse, that I could stand beneath the spotlight and belt out into the world to anyone that would hear it, and know wherever he was and whatever he doing from here on out for the rest of time, it'd send a shiver up his spine.
You wanted, you got it, but you didn't know, I wrote. You paid with your soul.
So here I stand now. The Last Scorned Woman, risen from the ashes of the broken young girl. I am strength, I am power and I brim with magic, here to seek vengeance from all who have taken from me, and every other girl.
And I've only just begun.