Love is Poison by Vivica Salem
As my room in Pinecrest Manor starts to darken, my eyes turn to tears and shadows. I am reclining on the couch in my living room, drunk on a bottle of Jim Beam. The thrift store paintings on the walls have faded from pastels and into obscure shades of black. The moon is faint as it slides through the window.
My whole heart is being burned alive at the thought of Hunter Wilden.
I am Harriet Sullivan, the girl who cannot have him. The girl who has no job and is living off of social security checks. The girl wrapped in melancholia like black vines and bandages. I feel like my whole self is about to collapse and fade into the ether.
When I ride the bus or walk down the street, I hear strangers use my full name, attaching it to insults. They believe I have no purpose and they live to degrade me. I don’t know where they learned my personal information from. I don’t know them. They stalk me like vultures searching for carrion in the desert. Gangstalking is a very real problem in this country, even though people call it a fictitious conspiracy theory. It is actually a very raw, harrowing reality. I keep remembering what happened yesterday in Riverfront Park as I search for those sky-blue pills I bought from a dealer downtown. Fentanyl. I cradle those tablets in my palm like a rosary. They will be my freedom from persecution. I bought the pills after I was gaslit in the park. I felt fractious, my red hair stirred wild by the wind. I was next to the clock tower when I spotted a man, two women, and a small child, a girl. One of the women called me a goblin and jokingly told the child I was going to get her. I can’t remember what I screamed at them. I know that we hurtled insults at each other until the guy called me a “man girl” and told me I was more masculine than he was. I’ve never perceived myself in such a way. I could never understand what it is like to be a man, and a man could never understand what it is like to be a woman. I ended up telling him that the women he was with were fat and ugly, and that his face is fucking ugly. I even told him, “You have an ugly child.” After that was said, I walked away toward the waterfalls. Nobody has ever said anything more stupid to me in my life.
Once I got to the cascading falls, I sat on a bench, contemplating that that man is not the only one to assume that I’m a transvestite. If the times I’m living in have to be so idiotic and cruel, then I would rather wilt into the water.
My thoughts turned back to Hunter Wilden. I have loved him since high school, never finding the courage to tell him. Now we are thirty years old and he still doesn’t know how I feel. He’s a tall, handsome brunette with eyes like an ocean at night. His mouth reminds me of a line from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The curves of your lips rewrite history. He ended up engaged to Esmeralda Long, a woman he met in college. I’ve been stalking his Facebook account for so many years, consumed by an obsession that I am always trying to shake off as it digs its claws into me. No matter how I try to banish all thoughts of Hunter Wilden, they keep coming back like an unwanted intruder lingering in a doorway. I find myself unable to think of other men.
And then suddenly, there he was, walking down the cement stairway next to the falls. I hadn’t seen him in person for so long. Once he saw me, he told me I was a sad, fat bitch. The first time he ever spoke to me. Perhaps he stalked me just to tell me that. It wouldn’t be the first time it has happened.
The sun felt like a smite upon my skin.
I sat there for the longest time.
Later, I was under a bridge watching a homeless man smoke fentanyl tablets off of tinfoil. I purchased six pills from him. Before I go to the woods to end it all, I vow to get revenge on Hunter Wilden. He lives on Capricorn street, part of a series of streets named after zodiac signs. I learned this from Google. They are not very far from my apartment. I place the fentanyl, a gun, a taser and a heavy rock that I stole from someone’s garden into a large leather handbag. I open my door, walk out and lock it behind me. I glide down the purgatorial hallways and out into the night. The streetlights remind me of ghosts as they caress my skin. I will soon have Hunter’s soul to take in the palm of my hand. I am outside of his house. Esmeralda’s car is nowhere in sight. All is silent. No dogs barking, no shouts, no airplanes, no breeze through the tree branches. I take the rock out of the handbag. I set the handbag down on Hunter’s front lawn and heft the rock through his window with Herculean strength. The glass shatters. As I pick the handbag back up, I whip out the gun and hold it out in front of me as I see Hunter running outside. Before he can say anything, I fire right at his chest. I am crouched right over him, tasing him all over. He implodes into the grass. I fire three more rounds. He is gone forever.
I am on my way to the nearby woods. My intention is to be gone, too.
Here I am in a myriad of trees. The voices can’t whisper or scream at me in this secluded place. I swallow the palm full of pills. They are like pieces of the sky when it is blue, and not dark like it is now. I am on the forest floor. I am wilting under torrential rainwater. I am freeing myself from a life of living under transparent glass, being peered at by a thousand indignant eyes. I have finally pulled the thorns out of my skin.
