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    I observed her get out of her car, walk around it, and stand in front of her drive way. Her shoulders dropped. The driveway was spray-painted a sickly red that dried orangey-red. The flowers she had planted were uprooted, hacked and strewn across the small lawn, with the dirt decorating the spots that the spray paint had missed.  The garage too was spray-painted. He had taken a metal baseball bat to it, leaving it deeply dented and mangled; when he’d been doing it, the sound was deafening.  I’d watched him do it. It was becoming almost a monthly sport.

    My window was open and the breeze blowing picked up the spray-paint and that fetid stench of something he had left on her door. The man was wretched. The first time I saw how he had destroyed her home I’d initially thought it was a hate-crime. I suppose, in some respects, him showing up here, with various weapons of choice wrecking havoc, is a demonstration of hate. 
    But love is blind, as they say.

    She stood by the driveway longer than she should have. The breeze kept blowing that stench, and I watched as she brought her hand to her nose. The stench resuscitated her stupor, because she began walking toward her front door. I had a clear view of the doorway. He was waiting for her. That was new. Usually he left.  Her steps froze when she rounded the corner toward her front door.  Moments later, they began shouting at each other.
    The shouting went on for what seemed like forever. I was used to this. There was always someone going off, someone’s child(ren) crying, someone getting beaten up, man or woman, privately in their home or on the front-lawn for the neighbours to see.  Sometimes the police came if someone remembered to call or if the issue of the day was especially vicious.  Things would quiet down for a few days, a few weeks maybe, or if we were lucky, a couple of months.  But it was never a dull moment in this quaint street of ours.

    Sure enough, like clockwork, people started peeking through their curtains. Doors began to open and the usual spectators came to observe. She didn’t seem to see the people gather around or the bold walk of -----, her rainbow-coloured hair, glistening too brightly,  approach them. She has always been the feisty one in this neighborhood. I didn’t like her much, though. Today she appeared to be more affected by the fight than usual. She began asking if the police should be called; if help was needed. The woman engaged in the argument whipped her head so fast that her braids almost whipped -----.  All I heard was “Can you mind your own business?”

    ---- looked flabbergasted. I almost choked on my own saliva.  That one always has the spirit of Satan in her; she is always ready to answer in violence, but today that evil spirit must’ve been on vacation because the rainbow-haired woman walked back to her door only cussing and shouting, threatening obscene things. The other woman walked to her door, skipping over whatever grotesque, rotting thing her man friend had left for her. He walked away unapologetically, leaving the spray paint and the steel baseball bat. He never came back to clean. He destroyed her property and walked away without a care in the world.  Men like him never care about who they hurt, how their violence, whether public or private destroy the community. And her. She is always left to pick up the pieces: both financial and emotional.
                                                    



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    I miss you. I don’t know why this feeling is very strong today, but I just thought I would let you know. I suppose I could just tell you myself directly, but I know you won’t hear me. What I mean is, you will hear the words, but you won’t hear all that I am not saying with those words; the things that I can’t articulate, and that don’t sound genuine no matter how I pepper them with the correct verbiage. I wrote you a poem that I immediately tore up. It was half a page of sentiments that seemed too personal. Then I sat and fantasized about what I would tell you in person, but I dismissed those thoughts with some music. In fact, as I lay there, with the thoughts swirling in my head, I forced myself to sleep, hoping that thoughts of you wouldn’t carry over into my dreams.
    The thing is, you appear in my dreams unexpectedly.  Does your constant appearance have meaning? Or is it one of those times whereby you attempt to draw meaning from something, and you analyze, ponder, and discuss a matter dry, not realizing that the matter is dry; that you can’t draw water from a rock?  Evidently, traces of your shadow linger in me, tormenting me, teasing me that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

    How do I starve my sub conscience of your face? What must I do to put to death thoughts of you? What must I do to kill all traces of you so that you will no longer permeate the deepest recesses of my mind? I’m not sure what I miss about you. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know if I ever really did.

    There was a time that I searched for you; I made a desperate attempt to retrace my steps, to find you and restore things back to their “proper” place. I held on to you until I was skin and bone, my desire for you decaying my body from the inside out. I had to let go. I cried a lot, you know. I felt numb for the longest time. Some days I could not even sleep. Most days I felt as though I’d been holding my breath under an ocean, and had to fight through the panic of not being able to reach the surface in time to gasp for breath.  When I broke the surface, that breath of air was sweet, and glorious; I cherished it as long as I could. I couldn’t enjoy it for long because just when I thought I was free, thoughts of you dragged me back to the bottom of the deep. It took a while to breathe normally again, to convince my brain that I wasn’t running out of air when it recycled images of you.

    I wish I had discovered that part of you that I tell myself exists.  I don’t know for what though. These days I tell myself that you don’t really exist, that it’s my mind constructing a shadow of something that was never there to begin with. You know how sometimes you remember something but not the details, so because of your emotions, feelings, desires, etc. you end up filling in the blanks of an experience that doesn’t belong to you? That’s what I am doing. I am missing something that never existed.


    I must release you somehow. Funny enough, despite you haunting my dreams, I don’t want you. I shudder when I think about how desperately I wanted you. I fashioned you from wood, dipped you in yellow paint and thought you a god. But, none of this matters. You are a phantom that I must release. The “you” I thought I knew doesn’t exist. I have to release you and trust that it is all for the best.  I miss you, though. Today especially, I miss you lots.
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    Chenai.
    28.
    The Lord has given me His words of wisdom....morning by morning He wakens me and opens my understanding to His will. Isaiah 50:4


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