In each new Saw movie the villain creates impossible situations, dire threats in which one person lives but lives in turmoil after the other dies, bloody metal jaws and sharpened tuning forks, dripping. Sometimes, for each unwilling participant, there is no way out. And sometimes, to go on living after it all is worse than succumbing.
It feels this way now, yes. I know it does. I know it feels for you like it must have felt for his mother when she birthed him, when she pressed her hands against the side of her thighs in the hospital bed, gasping, wondering if this tiny spoiled thing in her palms was worth the agony it caused her. Like a beehive exposed, throbbing in pools of yellow, like a hand pitched into the beautiful mauve searing of a pile of coals.
He didn’t have to slip a knife beneath your chin for it to hurt. He hurt his mother when he came into the world from her body using only his own. He didn’t have to look like Jigsaw for it to hurt. I know that the good drowns the bad, that you pull the good over your head like knitted waves, that the bad is just a spoonful of poison, and the good, the antidote. But tomorrow, you can leave him. Or even today. You can be the free woman down at the water pulling necklaces of oysters into your pot, the woman who cooks alone, runs alone, goes on alone, and loves it.
You’ve done it before. When you were born, like him, you left the thing that loved you. You slipped from the amniotic sac, the thing that sustained you, and moved out into the world, the thing that cradled you. You could have stayed inside. Comfortable, where everything was handed to you. You could have stayed there, and fed, and drank, and never left. But you did, and you can do it again.
Once more. I know that when he felt his way into you, that you became the octave in his song, that he gave voice to every note. But after time, the pitch deepens. The pace slows. He’s built himself up at the expense of you. A mountain, after all, is built on rock.
A dance in which one partner has already left the floor is no dance at all. He checked out a long time ago, like a guest from a hotel, only a hotel always tries again no matter how many people have left. You don’t have to try again. Not for a while. There is nothing to try.
But there is everything to gain. If not today, tomorrow. The world awaits.
I sit here and tell myself that I gotta move on, that I need to start making myself happy, that you truly don’t matter and that I can be without you. Then I fall asleep and dream of you, wake up in sweats, wake up in tears and it’s like everything I told myself is forgotton.
