Defensive Demonizing

I fucked up

and when I realized it

I felt terrible

that I hurt someone

I cared for so much

*

For a moment

I thought he was

simply setting boundaries

Helping me realize

how I could be a better human

how I could make a change

*

Just when I thought

we were coming to

a meaningful understanding

and the dust was settling

*

That’s when he began

to tell me a story

that seemed unrelated

*

He told me about an angry girl

who was at his house one evening

He described her as sadistic

and said she ruthlessly attacked him

over and over again

*

He said he had to defend himself

to the point of hurting her

because she wouldn't stop

attacking him with that sadistic look in her eye

*

That’s when his friends intervened

and told him to go easy on her

because she’s a friend who means well

*

I was concerned

so I asked some questions

Wondering if he was okay

Wondering why he let a sadistic girl

into his house

who attacked him ruthlessly

*

That’s when he turned the tables

and flipped a switch

*

He compared my honest mistake

that filled me with remorse

and was willing to change

to an angry, sadistic girl

who deliberately attacked him

over and over again

*

Later he told me he thought

she was flirting with him

That threw my head for a spin

*

It made me flashback

to the first night he spent at my place

when he told me there was an older woman at his work

he had his eye on

who he had been pursuing

She had been telling him she’s not interested

but stringing him along

The cruelest form of flirting of them all

As lab rat experiments show

the brain knows no chemical difference

between bread crumbing and a heroin addiction

*

This was all so puzzling

Does he prefer women who's flirting style is cunningly cruel

or sadistically violent?

Does he always demonize the people who love him

when they make a human mistake?

*

Maybe if I was deliberately violent like the angry, sadistic girl

Maybe if I was manipulatively cunning like the bread crumbing woman

Maybe he wouldn't have demonized my honest mistake

Maybe he would have given me a fair chance

instead of discarding me with his judgments

*

But instead

I, the woman who loved him

the woman willing to own up to her mistakes

was hit with the uppercut of his defenses