Succubi

Emotional vampire, or succubi…  seductive, beautiful, appealing; with the ability to draw others in before feeding on them, emotionally. Draining them of everything they have.

When it comes right down to it, there is nothing special about me. I’m just as bad as anyone else. Sometimes I think I’m worse. I’m just as nasty and manipulative and spiteful as people get.
Just a week or so ago, I proved to myself just how bad I can be… and I think I may have proved to someone else that the person who exists here, within the sugary confines of my blog, she’s much nicer on screen than she is in real life.

Reach out to me, I’ll pull you close. Feed off you, suck every bit of life force you have. And the when you refuse me, refuse that raging thirst I have, that black hole of need… If you say no, for your own preservation, I will bite you. Claw you.

I’ll amaze you with just how nasty I can be.

I can show you the worst in emotional manipulation, in self pity and emotional blackmail, in nasty, spiteful passive aggression. I am that mangy bitch who bites any hand that offers her comfort, her mind filled with a swarm of bees in pain, batting off the insides of her mind.

I’ll bet you never imagined I could be like that.

I’ve always been like that… it’s just that I hide it well.

After the rush of spite passes, after I have lashed out and done what damage I can… I hate myself with a dull passionless fire. I’m exhausted, being me… I hate living in my head. I’m so very ashamed of myself, the same kind of shame I used to feel as a child in the wind down of a temper tantrum– all kicking and screaming and rage and tears– that I simply couldn’t control.

I feel like a child. Spoilt and selfish and nasty… and I know it’s truth. I say people push me… but how can they help it when I lash out like this?

I’m not sure if it’s self flagellation or penance or punishment, or if its just that I’m so bored with feeling dead inside, so sick of screaming and crying and wanting someone to hold me and make it better… scream at me, please. Hate me. Cry. Do something, anything, rather than treat me as disposable. Show me some kind of passion– anything. Hating me is better than cutting me off… at least if you hate me, then somewhere cares.

If you hate yourself enough, there’s a small, tight space in your soul that burns with spite. It’s dark and needy and on the verge of a psychosis– inside you’re screaming that you will hurt yourself if someone doesn’t sit up now and make nice.

I’d like to say its all about self punishment, but it’s not. It’s about need, my need, that black sucking hole of it that I think can only be filled by the only thing in my life that’s ever made me happy– a man, a relationship, someone to tell me they love me, even when they don’t; someone to say its OK, even when it isn’t.

Self destruct, says that dark soul space. Maybe if you hurt yourself enough someone will say “please stop that, I love you.”

And if they don’t… then you’ve done what you have, and you can hate yourself even more. There is nothing that dark space likes more than room and heat to fester.

Self destruct.

Hurt myself as much as possible without leaving marks or scars or physical damage, without hurting others, without ending up in a hospital ward.

The options are limited. Sharpening a short kitchen knife and slicing my skin seems appealing… the blood. Not even the redness of it, just the way the light shines off it as it pools in the slit I’ve created.

But it leaves marks and infections, and people who cut themselves cannot be trusted with their own children. And, deep down, that dark spot in my soul is a coward, and the physical pain of wounding myself is too intense for the ferocity it would like to unleash on me.

So we don’t do that.

I no longer venture into kicking things, head butting things, punching things. It’s an ineffective form of self harm that people see as hysterical and attention seeking. And head butting a wall is, short of driving a ride on mower down the freeway, the quickest way to get yourself locked up.

I don’t mind drugs, and the thought of smoking until my lips are numb and I vomit, disappearing into a melancholy haze… that’s appealing. To temper that appeal, I have two small children with one vulnerable, human parent (”You’re not going to die, are you, Mummy?”), and the memory of exactly what a psychosis looks like, close up. And those things are enough.

Alcohol is not my thing… I don’t know why. My stomach is clenched in a knot, and alcohol makes me sick at the happiest of times. Again, it just won’t go down with the ferocity that is necessary, with the haste and abandon required.

And– huh– the ridiculous fucking truth of being a mother, losing her mind. I have children to take care of in the morning. I have a limited amount of time with which to scream my fury into the universe… and it doesn’t cater for a raging hangover.

I want to find a nightclub where it’s dark and the floor is sticky and the beat of the music is bass enough to effect the bump of my heart. I want to suck up people’s energy, have my ears ringing into silence with the screamed pitch of humanity trying to be heard over the lub–dub rhythm of a god. I want to watch people laugh, kiss, dance, get drunk and sing. I want to suck all that in, envy it, reminisce for it…

I want to watch, and know, and punish myself until it hurts.

I want to remember what it feels like to be alive.

I text a friend, and acquaintance, a boy I knew in high school who is now a man that simple sociological principles tell me is dangerous. Not ‘dangerous’ as in, ‘you may get hurt (again)’; but dangerous as in, you may find yourself in jail. Or at the very least randomly searched, with the motivation being that you associate with known criminals.

He sleeps with too many women, and talks about it in a manner that is disgusting and revolting and you don’t want to admit is alluring. He is regularly tested for HIV and STD’s, he tells us one night at the pub. “With my lifestyle, you have to.”

He is the exact opposite of my who my husband was… he is disrespectful and unkind and uncaring. But, dammit, he is Tony’s height and Tony’s weight, with the same brown eyes and short dark hour and tattoos…

If he didn’t speak, and the scent of his skin didn’t ruin it…

And after, I could weep for myself, if I liked. I could hate myself more and more, fall deeper and deeper into that dark, sticky hole in my soul.

I don’t, of course. In the end, eventually, after smoking so many cigarettes I have ulcers on the fleshy insides of my mouth, I write until my eyes are falling shut. And then I go to bed.

I have children to wake to, early.

Don’t congratulate me
… it doesn’t feel right. I know, it’s the socially acceptable ways things are done, to pull your socks up and avoid a nervous breakdown.

But every time I do, I am that little bit more frozen inside, that little bit more dead. Every time I do, I forget a little bit more what it was like to feel passion, or anger, or love, or anything.

I don’t think I ever quite realized how sad being a shell of person can be.