5 signs your soul mate is a villain.
By Alison Nappi.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ~Mary Oliver
He will come for you in your darkest hour. That is when you are the most ripe, the most ready, the most willing to make a deal. You think your darkest moments are when you are crumpled on your knees, alone in the dark, trying to hide your sobs from the neighbors with the white noise of your TV.
But darker still is the moment you rise, put on a fake smile, and run out into the night, seeking to trade in the rancid stench of a decaying past for the pulsing, living, animal redness of the false light night.
In but one moment of weakness you have betrayed yourself, and it is enough. This small self-betrayal: your slick shiny lipstick, your sultry eyeliner, your scuffless patent leather heels, lays the groundwork for him to plant his seed. You have forgotten love, and you wish him to reveal it to you, but this is not his purpose.
He will teach you about love by showing you that you never knew it, that you cannot tell a sinister enchantment from a divine light.
This is his service: the mastery of seduction, of dark-lights, of torment and pleasure. You will fight him, but not for long. He is your date with destiny. He is an agent of all that tempts you to deny your truest calling. And he is very good at his job.
“All evil is not bad. Some evil comes to shake us out of our sin; some evil comes to liberate us. Some evil is a gift of grace. Grace gnashes.” ~Douglas Jones
There is no University, no education you can buy that will prepare you for this. Your professor’s education did not come upon him easily, and his debt is not counted in dollars and cents. He has sacrificed, and suffered and trained for this, in just as many lifetimes as you. He is your fate-struck nemesis.
He did not need to look deep to see you heaving your heavy load, and like magic, he will light your grief on fire and drive it over the canyon’s edge.
Now that he has gained your trust, he knows you will soon belong to him. It is not difficult to capture she who does not occupy the space of her own spirit, and it is this pain that you have not yet identified that he will next promise to remove.
You do not understand the nature of your pain, but he does. Pain is his specialty. You think the hole inside you is created by lack: any lack at all, but really it is only your perception that is broken. You are convinced that there is something outside you that can fill this space, and you are secretly consumed by finding it.
For him it matters not which false god you worship; he will conjure that which makes you weak. He will turn your eye away from the moon, and he will mesmerize you with fire and lightening.
Still not sure your leading man is a villain? Here are a few signs to look for as the path through the dark woods unfurls at your feet:
1. He gives it away too soon. No sooner than you agree to take his hand, he offers you unearned rewards. You choose not to question this because you are in need, and he begins to tinker with your life in places where it is too tight for you to breathe. In your relief you will not notice that he is slowly wrapping soft silk ropes around your ankles and your knees. You don’t fight him, because you are beginning to hunger for the embrace of his power.
He will tell you that he holds you in his care, and you, who have not learned how to care for yourself, will feel safe. You have walked before with two-faced friends, but they were not nearly as dangerous as he is, because you knew what they were. But he is an enigma: mysterious and otherworldly. He is an aspect of your hidden self, a part of you that you have long-ago banished to the underworld. It is his job to expose you. He leads you to frightening places, and shows you secrets you did not know about yourself.
You begin to change.
**
2. He extracts you from your former life. You are running from something, and so you do not mind it when your doorstep fades into the background of your life with all of the comforting and familiar voices. In a dream you do not remember, you’ve already said goodbye. Deep in your spirit you already know you may never return from this place you are going, and if you do, you will not be who you were before. They would not recognize you. They would not know you anymore.
“You must enter the forest of adventure at the place where it is darkest. If there is a light or a path, it is someone else’s.” ~Joseph Campbell
You protest only weakly as he guides you past the boundaries of the ordinary world. A forbidden intrigue rises up from inside you and he uses it to reassure you that you’re safe in his big, meaty hands. Just to seal the deal, he gives you an amulet he made just for you.
You accept it like a chain around your throat, which, he claims, only proves he has taken responsibility for your well-being, and isn’t that what you wanted? He has a way of making your shadow seem so small, but you haven’t yet realized that it is only because his is so large.
There are many unusual creatures who reside along this dark path through the ancient, hissing forest. Not all of them look fearsome; some are strange and beautiful, but there is an underlying dis-ease in this place. You deny knowing this.
You refuse to acknowledge that deep within you it is comfortable to be amongst the poisonous flowers, the meat-eating plants.
The residents here know you by name, and yet you will continue to play innocent, and he will let you… for a little while.
He can protect you here, he says, because this is his homeland. And soon, this land will claim you too, because you have forgotten the true source of your self, and have settled for the jungle of trickery and illusion. It has much to teach you, but it is a dangerous and seductive master who will not let you go easily once you’ve accept its forbidden fruits. In fact, it intends never to release you, and before the long day of your life is through, you will go to war to save yourself.
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” ~Flannery O’Connor
**
3. He shifts his shape. And he shifts yours too. As you follow him deeper and deeper into the shadowy landscape you begin to notice things about him you have never seen before: the way his eyes change color, and his pupils change shape. The way his hands seem to get bigger and smaller, how his incisors sometimes seem too long.
He has delighted you with tricks from the beginning, but it is slowly seeming to you that a facade is crumbling with every step, and in moments when the guitar string is stretched too tautly you see him- just for a second- without his skin. You are startled and heart-sickened enough to pretend that what you saw is not real, and you carry on. You want to run, but it is as though you are bound, or frozen. How did this happen to you?
You love how he can twist himself into whatever you need: a silk scarf that makes you feel feminine in moments when you are too afraid to be a woman, a bolt of lightning when the lights have gone out, fire when you are cold and hungry.
He is a man of great talent, but you have not yet admitted to yourself the cost of your entanglement: you must change yourself to keep him.
You let him chip away at you like marble that needs a shape. You let him trim down your hips, enhance your breasts, tap chains around your ankles. You are the bait when he must distract the two-headed beast to retrieve the emerald.You are the little girl he keeps chained in the cave with his gold coins and other earthly treasures. You are his concubine, accepting all his tastes as though they were your own.
**
4. He possesses you. You are already too deep in the woods to find your way out alone, and you are counting on him to keep you from being swallowed by the sliding earth, devoured by what screeches through the tree tops at night. In your dreams, he comes and takes you places you can’t remember in the morning. You begin to see things out of the corners of your eyes: fast moving shadows, snake-like movements in the brush, eyes.
He smiles, and tells you not to worry, that these creatures are his pets, and you begin to see that you are too.
“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.” ~Flannery O’Connor
You have become loyal to him, as if your survival depends on it. You have been increasingly willing to accept that there will be times when you must beg if you wish to eat. You wish always to stay close, and when he ties you to a tree while he goes hunting, you feel lost and forlorn. You have begun to see yourself only in relationship to him; somehow he has set up camp inside of you. Somehow he slithers through your veins with your blood.
When you are without him, you still feel him, watching. When he is away, you still hear him in your mind. When you go seeking for something you need inside you, he is where it used to be, keeping the gate, rationing out your power and energy to you, on consignment.
**
5. He is (spiritually/emotionally/physically) violent. You didn’t realize it at first: the way he was manipulating you, or rather, you enjoyed it. You were used to violence before you met him: you tormented yourself relentlessly. He alleviated you of the need to do this, slyly relieving you of your duties as guardian and tormentor.
First, he stripped you of your title. Next, he took your pain in his hand and told you it was now his. Then, he only used it to whip you when you hated yourself, and finally, he broke you at the hairline crack.
“[People] don’t want their grace black…. Visitations of dark grace stand out as huge gifts when compared to actual life.” ~Douglas Jones
It is this shattered bone that is your salvation. It is this dark and sacred moment, when the hairline fracture inside you becomes a canyon, that you can finally see why your life never worked before. You knew something was amiss from a young age- never fresh, not innocent- and you can finally see why as you gaze into the wreckage hidden by the singed and fallow ground upon which you tried to build a life. It is possible now to reclaim your power. It is possible now to cast out the hidden lies inside you.
You can’t fail to see it now. The castles must now crumble. The night must now fall. The dawn must now come.
He, mistakenly, has unfrozen your time.
The secrets you keep will now bubble up like boiling tar, and you will burn to ashes so you can rise, like the phoenix.
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~Rumi
You are about to learn who you are for the first time in your life. Welcome to the hero’s journey. You are already beginning to discover that nothing is as it seems: that the black hats, and the white hats are indecipherable.
You do not know what is good for you, and what is bad. You do not know yet that the weakness you have shown is about to unearth Goliathian strength. You do not see that you are the giant, but you will, because your survival will reconfigure you completely, revealing that you cannot be swallowed, bought, sold or owned.
You will realize that you, the maiden in distress, are really the great goddess experiencing a moment of smallness in a vast book of fairy tales, where the beast reveals the beauty.
*****
{Claim your throne}
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Alison Nappi
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