[image description: An Art Nouveau depiction of a barefoot woman standing in a crenelated courtyard. She wears medieval dress of purple and green holds a flower to her chest. It, like all the flowers and red-capped mushrooms around her, are poisonous. Text reads, “78, RAPPACCINI ~ THE SMALL GOD OF TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS"]
As a rule, she doesn’t mean it.
She’s only following her nature; she can’t help the things she does. And if that weren’t enough, her name is a clue as to that nature—she was taught the wrong ways of loving by the people who raised her, who never knew how to love in a healthy fashion, and passed that ignorance on to their daughter before she was divine, when she was just a human girl desperate to be loved.
But her lovers tell themselves she doesn’t mean it; she just has a temper, she just doesn’t understand that words can hurt, that lies can be a poison that seeps into the skin and builds up in the bones, until it never leaves the body again. Until the choice is burn or die, and sometimes it isn’t a choice at all.
She doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t want to do it. She isn’t trying to hurt them; she loves them so much, she would never try to hurt them. Not on purpose. She just gets so mad sometimes, and she wouldn’t know what to do without them, wouldn’t know how to take care of herself, wouldn’t be able to keep her head above water. She needs them as much as they need her, and they forget that the word for a pretty poison that doesn’t quite kill you but won’t let you go is “drug” and the word for a relationship with that poison is “problem.”
She doesn’t mean it. Not a single bruise or cut, not a single blow or harsh word.
She doesn’t mean any of it.
She does it all the same.
Her faithful are too many, her forsworn too few, but when you see her reflection in your mirror…run. Run while you still can.
Because she doesn’t mean it. But she’ll put you in the ground.
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