On the topic, to crush bugs beneath your toes:

Right, I say as I turn the page shut, let's begin this tragicomedy told in a handful of acts. I lift a finger—unfortunately, this is the second time I've had to repeat this, but I digress—no matter, I wail, screaming into a soundless vortex. There were metaphors and analogies and dilly-dallyisms that were here before they were whitened by water. I guess some things, according to fate, were truly never meant to be.

So let's reconstruct this hate from memory—piece by bitter piece. Reminiscing of a timeline five months prior is too mundane of a doom-scrawl, no, I fear I have been consumed by vile vitriol. Let's go back in time, hop into that little storybook I've tailored, fitted nook and cranny to the lies and sweetums I've had to sweep away. Oh, what dust. It's getting between the claws of my fingertips.

There was a tale here, and if I recall correctly with my handprints over the sand, detailed the loss and lovelorn of the Devil, the God-King, and the Fool. Here, at the edge of the Earth, where lines meet and ends met in the tides washed over-shore, I can pick apart and scrutinize our co-written, co-authored disbelief. 

It begins something like this: on the topic of hatred, I have only one thing to say—you were my first love, but you will not be my last. That seat of misery has been reserved for another, and I have already smeared their black-bones with agony parallel to the floor. Crushed by footsteps, smattered by bugs; that was what I should have done to you the moment we traded breaths.

Some say the walks of life, of death, would blow kisses at air, brush tongues or cheeks, perhaps a little this-and-that as they chase each other's tails. But no, you were different—tongue in cheek, maybe? Kissing me to death, slowly? That's venomous, you tar-addled snake. 

I'm losing coherence of the story, but I remember it's partially mine to blame, wearing scarlet-windowed lenses like a cross hung ninety-degrees. Do you remember the Devil? Indeed, he gave it to me, pressed them over my lashes and whispered half-truths, real lies; selling me concepts of no tangibility. Promises of no deadlines, more boundaries blurring from lies, lies, lies.

You were the Devil, that's what you are, and had no idea you masqueraded as such. And you, you, you damn evil God-King, this fool became a deity-killer just to crack your coconut-skull. Hell, I should've done worse; I should've stomped your ribs in till they caved like a canyon scarred in its abdominal middle. I tripped and fell for those lies, those honey-trapped promises; suckled on them till I was brained like a toddler, addicted to a taste so sickening it could only be dribbled from poison.

Trip, trip, trip. This is where I tap the cover of my book. You cannot blame a fool for falling in love when he has never been given warmth. You cannot blame a blind man for falling into consequences when he cannot fathom an elephant. In a language you've missed, we have a term—puk gai, or quite literally, falling on the street, and those who are in-the-know, know, that when your feeble hands paw the concrete and your pearly teeth knock white against red against gray, that's a curse, that's your fall; may you drop dead.

By the off-chance the slain corpses of ants and insectoids come across my will, I have nothing to apologize except for the halt of my tall finger. I should've been harsher; I should've done everything I had listed above. I should've shoved my heart down your throat till you memorized the feeling of choking on glass, should've punched my elbow into your Adam's apple till you vomited out that pulsating organ. Perhaps then, as you hurl and heave bile, you'll learn to visualize a fraction of the distaste I have to live with for the rest of my mediocre life.

On the topic, to rip your vocal cords out and snap them over two spines—

—kiss the damn, fucking dirt, the both of you, and may we never meet in Heaven, in Hell, or on the same soil of our great, mowed planet.

~11:35 PM. MARCH 2025.