βᾰκχείᾱ

This is my grace.

This is my dignity.

This is my forgiveness.

This bloody retribution is the closest I have come to evening the score.

The temperature of your skin, mere tenths of a degree distinct from mine, is strange.

I can imagine the temperature of the blood rushing underneath: drunken, unbridled.

Effrēnātā audāciā.[1] The blood of a man.

My smile holds the only power I ever had over you.

You fear the silent, smiling woman.

(Never could quite figure out what was so funny.)

I’ll tell you:

I can picture, with perfect clarity, how it would feel:

To bare my teeth and wrench your hair out of your scalp.

To take your curls in my hands and hold on for my dear life.

I revel in the smooth quiet sound your intestines would make slipping out of your gaping abdomen.

I could rip your heart out of your chest.

(Not that you use it except for the pumping of blood.)

Could drag it out of the wreckage of your shattered ribcage. Slowly.

(Agony is slow.)

Then fast, frenzied.

Drunken and reverent.

You would be touched.

Touched at your deepest.

Touched at a point that can’t be reached unless it’s from within.

I’ve been to that place within myself. I could take you there—

It’s my pleasure.

Lex talionis.[2] Tooth for tooth, measure for measure: Only fair, after all.

This is your retribution.

I don’t want you to burn.

I don’t want you to starve.

I don’t want you to suffer, to live long and sad, to die alone.

I want to hurt you the way it hurt me, once the blind pain passed.

I want to hurt you the way that it hurts me now.

I want it to linger far longer than something as simple— as vulgar— as pain.

I want to do to you what you did to me.

My bacchanal is something beautiful.

I want to rip you to pieces.

This is the closest I have come to forgiving you.

There is no forgiving you.

I can only imagine tearing you apart.

Letting your blood run down my arms and leaving, somewhere inside, a piece of myself for you to find.

An inexact solution, certainly.

Incomplete, messy. Even so:

This is the way I imagine forgiveness must feel.

Notes

[1] Cic. Cat. 1.1

[2] Talion Law; Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia. "talion." Encyclopedia Britannica, September 27, 2023