Weakness

So no.

No, you NEVER taught me what I was worthy of. Not once.

You talked and you preached and you pragmatized the shit out of theories, half-born ideas, and conspiratorial things. You instilled fear and jumpy response times.

You even spoke of the love we should have between us, father and daughter, even dreamt of passing on the culture to us kids and interspersing your fragmented views of that with ambiguous and broken pieces of your ideologies.

But your love was limited and limiting. And at the very least, broken.

I have been hurt by you in more ways than one and in overlapping accounts just by the recurring, overlapping sting that your negligence keeps doling out - like the ring of a bell long after it's been smacked - and I have begged and pleaded with God, with others, with friends and non-friends alike, for help to overcome the immeasurable myriad of complications to have come from that chasm.

But I could forgive all of that if only it hadn't rained on down through my brothers.... men whose views on women are poisoned as your own, ultimately and finally allowing them to label ME as oversensitive, telling me to "fuck off with [my] oversensitivity", as "not being able to take a joke" because degradation is somehow funny. Degradation of the human being is somehow okay. Forgetting the value that a saviour FAR greater than you has placed on the worth of a human soul. Somehow, in your bullshit, broken, "I don't need God" superior piety found in your maligned and disordered views, it's up to your victims to suck it up, it's never up to you to be the gentle protector.

And it doesn't matter how many times I've tried to rise above the nature of that portion of the relationships I have with each of you TO retain some kind of relationship with you, not one of you, not even the gentle brother of the two, can find it in your hearts to stop being royal dicks. It doesn't matter how much garbage I have to wade through to be someone you would want to talk to or have on your side, I can always trust that you will always turn, grindingly turn, carving out the ground in your spin as you revile me, and froth at the mouth. Because, heaven forbid, someone have an opinion you don't agree with. Heaven forbid I was actually sensitive and that be acceptible to you, dear brutes.

And OH MAN, does this feel/sound familiar. Oh, does it ever. Like a tattered, useless blanket would. Ugly but familiar. Grievously underqualified for its task to warm, but all you know and something you've always had to work with. Oh yes, I can dare identify it because it takes one to know one. How many YEARS have I spent controlling, manipulating people's responses. I didn't even know I was doing it and then when I did, I didn't know how much worse it had been because it was still seeping into every corner of my current relationship. How many relationships have I ruined or exchanges I've tainted with my easily butthurt, defensive, tantrumey, fit-throwing reactions! Oh yes, like a familiar blanket indeed. Sick and useless. Oh yes, the facade of warmth. Like as with many transgressions to have passed in our path.

So I propose nothing. I have no answers, no suggestions, not even an offer to strike a deal with. There is no such thing as negotiations with hardened men. I desire nothing, I hope for nothing. I just pray for the silence to move into walls that cannot be climbed.