The Purge

The time had come.  He had feared it might while knowing that it would.  It was all his fault, all of his own doing.  He had berated himself as it was happening, telling himself that he was setting it all up for the big fall, but he had been enmeshed in a manipulation of his own devising and enjoyed the fog of enticement and confusion that he had spread about himself. 

Things could not remain as they were.  

It was all about a woman, of course, one that he had been disinterested in at first, followed by a mild curiosity and a certainty of cuteness.  This was a progression that for him tended to telegraph what would become a great entanglement.  It all suddenly exploded one night when absolutely nothing of note occurred.  

He was half sure that she dabbled in witchcraft and that when she shook his hand in that odd way she had taken something from him, something that she brought back to her home and used in performing some cheap ritual that she didn't even believe in.  There had been a physical manifestation to it as well, if you took the story all of the way.  When he arrived home that night, unsure and confounded, he had found an odd traveler on his back, a weird insect that he had never seen before, at least not in this region and not of that size.  He now regretted not keeping it, not studying it, not watching for it to reveal its depth of significance.

But that was all bullshit, really.  There had been no spell beyond the one that he had cast over himself seemingly starting that very night.  He built her up beyond anything that he had actually been able to observe of her.  He placed her on a throne in his heart and soul and convinced himself that they were destined to be and that she was something beyond the usual attraction, someone whom he had known in a previous life or somehow familiar throughout the entirety of all time, a mythic and multiple connection that had nothing to do with the physical now but had everything to do with the underlying truth.  It built to the point of forcing a fight or flight reaction upon him whenever he was aware that she was near.  And in the end that construction had showed its ugly falsity in the face of the world as it was.  There was no hope.  There would be no connection at all, no assurance that what was in his head was even close to real.  It was all a sham.

And therefore, for his own sake, his sanity and continued existence, he began the process of tearing it all down and cursing every piece of it as it came apart and he cast it into the pit of nothing, of forgetting, of never living again.  He had to do what he could to convince himself that she had never in fact existed at all and that anything that he might encounter of her in the future was just another of life's ugly jokes, a person of the flesh who only barely reflected that presence that he had held to such lofty heights and worshipped, groveling at her feet.

It was going to be a long process  But it was a matter of life and death, after all.