LJIdol / LPF: Week 5: Kayfabe

Staying in character 

Or

my best friend the covert narcissist

 

 

She couldn't read my mind

 

I knew this because she told me 

 

I remember I was in tears when she had said this 

sometime in the first weeks or months after we met

 

I remember sitting at her dining room table 

after she’d practically rescued me from the streets

 

I remember she reminded me of my mother

 

I’d taken refuge on her couch when I had nowhere else to go

 

I worked for my meals as she taught me a trade she was already using against me

 

Animal behaviorist 

She taught me how to study the body and read all the cues

To know how the creatures in my care were feeling

 

Said she even knew how to provoke a response

 

Wind up the monkey and watch it dance

 

Made me cry on my birthday (two years in row)

 

She was always the victim

But also 

The judge, jury and executioner

 

I often circled the blocks instead of going straight home

Even after I got a job at a cafe on the other side of the city

 

Feeling myself banished from within my own home

Because I wouldn’t dare grow wings without her permission 

 

I walked softly and carried charms with my own name etched in the surface 

Held them in my pocket when I was interrogated over breakfast 

 

By then I was a bird in a cage made of obligation and guilt and financial dependence 

 

I came home one day to find the stairs were being painted by a local street artist 

A mural had been commissioned as well, it appeared two days later:

A young girl stood on a plate 

in what looked a lot like the favorite blanket I tended to drape around me 

The girl seemed to be unaware of the large shadowy figures with forks and knives

 

I decided this must have to do with her internalized feelings 

about body image and eating disorders than anything to do with me

As I walked on eggshells on my way to my own sanctum

 

That she’d mocked to the new housekeepers (that she insisted we both pay for)

My organized chaos of tchotchkes and kitsch 

Old teacups full of loose change, lost buttons

Pin-backs traded daily off my jacket

 

They thought my kid must live there she told me

 

She’d reminded me of my mother

Whose abuse had already taught me how to be more than one person

How to take verbal punches to take the least amount of damage 

 

I’d come to her cradling bits of my ego like legos that never quite fit together 

 
An avid gamer 

She was a master at tetris

Building a maze around my sanity

With no exit strategy 

 

She was always the victim

But also 

The judge, jury and executioner

 

Planting a seed only to watch it grow

plucking the fruit when I most expected it

Calling it the rotten, irrational

 

Holding it up to the light before telling me there was never any light 

 

I am not what you think I am

Why would I lie?

 

Was it a lie, the one night I deflected her would be lecture 

by pretending I was too high to understand

rather than admit I hadn't yet seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 

 

She fancied being called a dragon

Or perhaps she was King Aurthur incarnate

Undoubtedly monarch of her own domain

 

And we all had our parts to play