Creative distinction. A gift. A talent. A faux pas. There are a lot of thing that were taken away from me during our relationship, but the ability to create things was the most sinister. Rape I can deal with: It's not so hard to blank yourself out after you've been guilted into opening up your guts for cock, again, the fifth time this week and you can't really feel his pinprick dick in you, anymore (probably the reason he wants power so bad; dudes and their penises, I swear, how he'd measure it once a month like he expected it to grow, then say, 'Six inches isn't so bad, right? That's bigger than average,' as if anybody really cares about the size of a dick). It wasn't the rape that really got to me or bothered me, it was how in the beginning stages, I tried to share the things I had made with him. He would offer a lot of advice about the things I made. Mostly, the advice was that I was bad at making. Imagine a world where somebody can be bad at making, bad at expressing themselves through the creative process. Imagine a world where only one standard and only one opinion really matters. Imagine a world where all the labels on drinks and the billboards and the paintings on the walls and the poems and the parables and the novels and the quilts and the hairdos and the automobiles all look exactly alike, are all made in exactly the same form. Imagine a world that's cookie-cutter and hardlined where there are no blurred edges and there is no shading. Imagine a world that's only shells and outlines, that's anesthetized, that's had all the fervor and the joy and the personality taken out of it. Imagine that's the type of thing you must write for the approval of a man who can't read and then imagine that you can't write like that because you'll never write like that because the point of writing has never been pretty prose, just honest prose. Imagine a world where you must lie and sit pretty like a perfect little Stepford Wife and write only perfect little things like perfect little rags folded into perfect little squares, a world where there is no margin for error and where the happy miracle of making a mistake isn't allowed to exist and, therefore, there is never any progress. Imagine a world without progress. Imagine a world dead. The only things that do not progress are dead things. Even then, they progress into decomposition. Imagine a world decomposed. Imagine a little seed, an idea, a fervent little desire. Imagine it living under the raging forest fire of being undone. Imagine being undone. Imagine. He said, 'Laughter's not a competition,' if I laughed too hard, if I found something too funny, especially if it was a joke he didn't get. There were a lot of jokes he didn't get, like himself -- walking, talking laughing stock, lizard person trying to belong. And how was I so blind and stupid, thinking that he did belong? And here I was, trying my damnedest to belong with him. But that's the power of isolation. When you're isolated, you don't know there's an entire world out there brimming with people who would love to get to know you. When you're isolated, you can't see past the four walls or out of the windows whose curtains you're not allowed to open because, 'The neighbors might see in.' Writing took too much of my attention. Writing made him jealous. He wasn't exactly literate. He did like to do the puffed-up idea of pretending he'd read a book or two (all the important books, you know, C.S. Lewis, John Steinback, all on audiobook of course). He couldn't spell the word 'fair' f-a-i-r, but spelled it f-a-r-e, instead. Why would I care of he spelled things phonetically? Sound it out. I believe in you. Ask if you're unsure: I can answer. But that type of support is to humiliating. How can anybody admit a weakness, I guess. Especially when you're six feet tall and built like a brick shithouse and a very respectable man in your violent profession. These closet Sadists, they're all the same. When every part of your life is some kind of competition -- it's like that for them, seeing everything as a competition -- and there's something you're unable to compete in (writing, for example) the next best thing is to pretend it's a disgusting task, to pretend it's a worthless enterprise.

I remember so distinctly being on Highway One on our road trip from Native Texas to Wild Alaska, coming around this turn on a mountain somewhere in Oregon and he'd never driven on mountains, this time we had lost reception for the GPS and how we were using maps to try to figure out where we were going. I'm not great at reading maps. I wasn't paying enough attention to him.

I was writing about the sunset.

He got all pissed off, slapped the notebook out of my hands, screamed, "You think you're so fucking clever, don't you? Writing your little words, stringing together your CLEVER sentences?"

Yeah, well.

Fuck him.