INTRO
So, I've been watching The Originals, FINAAAAALLY. And I'm at the whole, Rebecca being completely manipulated, destroyed, hurt, so on and so forth repeatedly thing. I'm feeling her so bad right now. All she wants is to love, trust and believe. And for someone, ANYONE, to choose her. And it's such a basic desire but to have the ability to have this desire after centuries of having it ripped away from you repeatedly and watching everyone destroy you for it-I can't imagine how it feels to have that.
The Marcel does THAT?!?!?!?!
So anyyyyway. This is my dedication to an open letter Rebecca writes to another Love of Her Life who betrays her.
She is us, and we are her, so this is my dedication to the Casket Girls of New Orleans, especially. May you all rest in peace xx
--x--
The Casket Girl Letter That Could Have Been
Dearest of All,
For every moment that I had with you, I have a hole in my memory.
It isn’t something that was going to happen, had our story died the normal way that it was expected to- no, it died because of our sins. The holes started as little fading pinpricks that were stabbing at my memories. Slowly, but surely, it began to widen itself like the virus that it was.
The pins became needles, and the needles turned into carefully constructed carving knives.
I cried the day that I realized I was going to have to leave you.
I thought I knew how our story would end because of that reason, but it turns out that I got exactly what I wanted. I cried into my cushions because I wanted our story to be the one with a different ending, and guess what? We got a different ending.
Stories, as I’m sure everyone knows, have hundreds of endings.
This was one that I expected much earlier on, during ours, but it was surprisingly shocking that it happened. What wasn’t shocking, however, is the fact that it happened around the time that I made the decision to believe in you, and our story, right before it happened.
Honestly, it’s rather predictable-the patterns in my life-that this would all happen, this way.
It’s ironic that I can forgive you, knowing I made the same mistake that you just made, and having spent years wishing I could have taken it back. I had tried, of course, but I had failed.
It still burns within me.
That failure.
I understand I, though. The person I hurt should never have forgiven, nor understood what I had done to us. Just like I should never forgive or understand what you’ve done to us. But because of that exact reason, I could never not forgive your sins.
It’s silly, but I would forgive you for a thousand heinous crimes, as long as you came home to me at night and whispered the truth of our love into my starved ears.
I hoped that you wouldn’t understand it.
I never want anyone to see me that clearly because to be seen like that would spell disaster. This is the sort of thing that I’ve spent my life being taken advantage of for. I cannot hate myself for it anymore. Instead, I hate the world for being an unsafe place for the naivety that I cannot get rid of. It is the sort of thing that should live in the hearts of many more people. Yet, it is the exact thing that people find themselves ripping out of their hearts in order to survive.
What is humanity, pray tell me, I’ve asked the sun, moon and stars again and again and again, until my throat is hoarse and all that is left for me to do is to scream at the unjustness of the world that I find myself stranded in.
But I digress.
You didn’t come see me that weekend. You don’t even know what I have had to sacrifice, just to get that little time with you. And you threw it all away.
It didn’t matter to you.
Not really.
Because, as we all know, we’re human. And humanity fights for what they want the most, regardless of everything else that comes with that fight-be it negative, or positive.
I threw it all away, to get even just another half-day with the person that I wish I could steal more moments with. And all I got was a week of nothingness, pain, regret and failure. Then it was the weekend and the week that was so filled with hope and the longing for one last weekend fell apart.
Even hope needs a few drops of water to survive.
But my hope was in a desert, and it survived that long because of the mirage it fed on.
I spent that weekend alternating between hope and fear.
You weren’t there at all-physically, or mentally.
That last night was the most painful night I’ve had in a very long time.
It was the night I had dreaded for at least a decade.
I had hoped that that night would never happen because I never believed that my dreams would so cruelly tumble down as I watched myself walk on the shattered pieces and ignore the bleeding trail I was leaving behind as I attempted to move forward somehow.
But that night did happen.
And I was alone.
It’s interesting, I find, to think about the only solace I can find in times like this.
A lot of the time, I can honestly say that I truly do hate myself. I have no sense of proper reality, so I never really trust myself but at a time like this, for that one tiny shining moment, I gain that shining hope and belief in myself for a second. For that one tiny time period of my life, the only thing I have to hold onto is myself. I cling on to the raw data of my situation- that regardless of the apparent family, friends and people who are supposedly in it for the long haul with me, the only person there for me during that moment is me.
The fact is, that I can only ever really depend on myself to be there for me.
I will always truly and utterly simplistically enough have one inconsolably obstinate truth: the absolute certainty of having only myself.
It’s tyranny, this truth, though.
To another, it may feel like a haven.
But to me, it is entirely a different story.
My heart almost always betrays me.
My mind is never to be trusted.
My instincts have led me down the darkest paths of my life experiences, so far.
And my body? It has continued to betray me since I can remember.
It is this body that ruins me.
It is this mind that tricks me.
It is this heart that stands up every time because it enjoys breaking apart once in a while.
And it is this soul that I leave behind, with every person who picks up the Raggedy Anne doll that I am, because they need to throw me away like the trash that I am when they’re done with me.
Again, I digress.
I can remember faintly now.
Ever since the day you broke me, the little pinpricks started up in my memories.
I think that it is my mind’s way of trying to patch together some form of sanity to preserve my tenuous existence in this world.
The feeling of when you looked at me like I was something.
It made me so very uncomfortable.
Because I did not know how to feel like I was worth anything. Like I mattered. I could not even comprehend the concept of being wanted for who I am. For being needed. For being loved for everything that I couldn’t help but be.
And after what you did, that memory is now false.
It is the memory of you looking at me like you know what you can get from me.
The look a person gives to a piece of property that he/she is appraising to calculate the expenditure vs. usage, in order to decide whether it’s a sensible purchase or not, and for how long one must keep it before moving on.
On the upside, it is a memory I am now losing.
I used to love seeing the tenderness in your eyes.
It scared me that anyone could feel something like that when they looked at me.
I expect to have someone look at me with love in his or her eyes right before they take my body against my will, and then fill me up with mental and physical agonies. But you, you looked at me like you could never hurt me that, in turn, made me feel safe. Safe, like I’ve never felt before. Not the kind of safe where I know I’ll be hurt and I feel a sense of comfort in the familiarity of the situation. It was the kind of safe where I actually believed that you would never raise your body to physically violate or hurt me. That you would never knowingly carve your words to take my sanity away. That you would try to genuinely love me the way that I believed people could love, when I read silly Victorian novels during my childhood years while listening to even sillier songs by the Backstreet Boys.
It’s not tenderness I see anymore.
I see the contempt in your eyes from knowing that you have me so completely, as did they all. The look that you give me because you have me so completely fooled that I would throw it all away to do your bidding.
Tell me how to please you, Master, so that you may never leave me, I cry out at that look.
It’s pointless, though, because people wouldn’t stick around for the likes of me.
You didn’t, now, did you?
I loved remembering how you would touch me. Sometimes you touched me almost reverently, as if you couldn’t believe you were allowed to. It made me feel like a goddess being worshipped. Like the Petrarchan sonnets that I used to love reading. Was I the Laura that floated among the stars, and shined with the light of the sun? You made me feel supernaturally beautiful, and strong, and holy.
I’d never felt worth touching before.
Truth be told, I hate that my skin touches my skin. It seems paradoxical but it is how I feel, unfortunately.
Too many people have soiled my body and my mind.
My body is not a temple.
My body is not even the kind of trash that turns into a compost heap and at least benefits plantkind.
Do compost heaps benefit anything? Or is it recycling that actually helps. I forget.
Anyway, the point is, I can now see the moments when you touched me much more clearly now.
I can see your thinly veiled disgust for my body, your snide compliments for my mind. The moments you said you wanted to touch me and feel me and be with me that I feared were not real, were moments you had to force yourself to do and say those things to further whatever cause you needed to.
To touch vermin, one must feel unholy.
I made you feel lesser, I’m sure.
I will not go on, my memory becomes sharper if I keep writing.
I suppose it is for the best that this hole becomes bigger.
I need to forget all those moments with you, because you never wanted another moment with me.
I convince myself that it doesn’t hurt.
I convince myself that your honey-glazed words are real.
That if you could physically be here, you would.
But you could have been there then.
And you weren’t.
You never want to be here again.
I wish I could let myself remember how it felt to kiss you, or to hug you. To hold you like I’d never have to let you go.
I wish I could feel you sleeping in my arms, or hear you breathing into my hair. I wish I could just touch you one last time and feel the pride that this is mine, and I am yours. I loved being with your skin because I felt closer to your spirit in those moments.
But I never got that one last chance to be with you.
And now, I imagine, if you tried to kiss me, that you could not hide the repulsion.
You’d recoil, and everything I loved would crumble into dust.
You’d try to pull me in, while you trembled at the horror.
You’d shudder in bed at night, unable to sleep with the thought of a human eternity with me.
No, perhaps it is better that we didn’t get the goodbye I threw so much away to make sure that we’d get.
I don’t deserve much, but I know I didn’t deserve any of my original false memories. I didn’t deserve the moments that I thought were pure and stolen because the gods were busy and didn’t notice I had a pocket of happiness sometimes.
I’m sorry that I was there.
I’m sorry that my existence existed.
I wanted to write out accusations, and scream hows and whys at you, but instead, I just feel that you did the right thing.
My only regret is that I don’t think you tortured me enough, but I suppose you did, in certain ways, because by sticking around, I’ll never know until the moment of your final betrayal, the level of torture that you created was real and truly exquisite.
You are very good.
I’m glad that I was a part of your weaving; I do so love being used and thrown away. I feel like I’ve gotten rather good at it, honestly.
I’m sorry that the memories are tainted, but I’m losing them anyway so I suppose they won’t remain a problem. I’m glad we had a story at all; there’s comfort in knowing that I never will feel a moment of true happiness or love. Such is my fate, and I gladly accept it because I got stolen fake memories with you for a while.
One gold coin means everything when you’re a filthy pauper on the streets, after all.
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre; conqueror of my heart and soul.
I’ll see you again.
Love,
Yours Truly.
