Devastate Me In The Rain.

The rain has been relentless. For the past two days, there has been nothing but grey skies and constant downpour, I wish it would never stop, even as the people around me long for the dry, arid heat they were complaining about just a month ago. It creates an eldritch desire in me, it reminds me of a specific feeling. There was a man I used to love who liked to haunt me. Sometimes, when I was away or he was out, he would call or send me cryptic messages about terrible, non-descript occurrences in my future. He would say he needed to talk to me about something important, but refused to tell me what it was. He would drop a bombshell, often untrue of debilitating information and then disappear for days on end. He'd tell me he had cancer or AIDS. He would tell me he was going to dump me when he saw me. He would tell me he had put porn of me all over the internet. He'd tell me he had found evidence of something wrong I had done, never revealing what it was but ensuring I understood that he would use it to destroy me. He would make me wait, days on end, in dread, and then when I saw him, the cruelty inside him that had been simmering in absentia would explode all over me. He broke my heart, over and over again, until I just stopped trying to pick up the pieces and became the devastation he inflicted on me.

They tell me, he couldn't have really loved me, you don't do that to the people you love. I would concede to this argument, but the premise that love is naturally, inherently good, constructive and wholesome, seems flawed. Love takes the flavour of who you are, it's like club soda, it changes flavour based on what you add it to, and then it adds bubbles, that make even the worst flavours seem festive. Whether he loved me or not, though, is irrelevant, because I loved him and that is what matters to me. No one ever tells me that I didn't love him. Evidently it is possible to love bad people, but not to love as bad people. Seems disingenuous, but then again, I am hardly an expert. It was important for me to love him, he couldn't have broken my heart, if I didn't.

And I had to have my heart broken.

Call it an addiction, a bad habit or just an unfortunate consequence of misunderstanding what it means to be human, but this longing is not going anywhere. The desire to be devastated, to carry with me the pain that evidences the power I give to people to hurt me, it won't leave me. When it rains like this, for days and without respite, I find myself mindless with a specific need. The words get lost on the way to my lips, there is a hard knot of perfidious emotion, stuck in my throat, impeding my ability to swallow life as it is. My eyes roll themselves to the back of my head, as if I am preemptively ensconced in the promise of dionysian revelry. My breathing is laboured, as if when I inhale, I forget, I have to let it out as well. The world becomes very quiet, not because someone has turned down the volume of the universe, but because the noise inside me has become so loud, it threatens to burst my eardrums from the inside. I cannot focus, on anything, longing becomes the singular state of my existence, and unlike the longing that emanates between my legs, I cannot trace this one back to its source. It seems to come from everywhere.

I go in and out of the house. I stand in the street as the rain falls over me, hoping for some kind of relief, I go back inside and stand under the fan, hoping the shivering from the cold will relieve me of some of this need. I strain my muscles by doing too much, so that the ache will abate some of the angst in my heart. I beg my husband to fuck me. *Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.* Until something breaks. Until the pain in my body is loud enough to trick me into forgetting the vaccum of pain in my heart.

It doesn't work.

I follow him around. I go after him in the kitchen. I grasp at his chest with my fingers, hoping to transmit this message into his skin, this message that cannot be sent in words. I sit at his feet and gently bang my head into his knee, again and again, like a wave stuck in the riptide, going violently back-and-forth. I beg him for more and more violence, so as to get to a state of lasting pain. I drag my feet as I chase him around the house, as if weighed down to the bottom of the ocean with a brick tied around my middle. It reminds me of the strange, inexplicable days several decades ago, when I chased my mother around the house, heady with a feeling I did not understand, hoping I would do or so something that made me lose her temper, and hit me. I still don't know what to call this feeling, but it never left.

As I follow him onto the terrace, I notice the rain has turned to a drizzle, he fiddles with the drain and I watch him, dissatisfied by how little water thrashes against my skin. Frustrated sounds escape my mouth, sounds that make no sense but scry a terrible future, I walk my moans over to him. As I grasp his shirt in my fist, the rain starts to come down more heavily again. He poises himself to dart towards the door, I hold him in my hand, not through the power of weak-grip, but the suggestion of my need for him.

"Please," I beg, as I have all morning, without adding any further information.

"What do you want?" He asks, holding me by the chin and staring into my eyes.

"Do something horrible to me," I say, my soul pouring out of the brim of my existence.

He looks at me like he feels sorry for me. That's a good start. I crumble before him and settle onto the wet floor, exhausted from the burden of this desire I am carrying.

"Come," he says, holding out his hand in my direction, "I will devastate you."

I crawl behind him towards the devastation he promises. He is the Piper and I need him to show me the cliff. I will jump into the inevitability, if he shows me the way. There is no cure for this curse, so I embrace it. You can sell your soul to the devil and come out unscathed, but there is no escape from the bondage of the rain. It haunts me and in my obeisance to its madness, I try to drown myself in a droplet.

And it works.

Because I don't want to breathe.