The Man and the Monster.
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Underneath the typical gentlemanly mask most wear when casually courting existed my greatest love and my greatest fear.
My greatest love is a beautiful man with a heart of gold, someone who had survived nearly 30 years of disappointments and continued on with grace. He was a man whose soul was as old as mine; I’d known him in many lifetimes before. The man’s eyes danced with wonder, and his love could warm the coldest of rooms. He was my best friend, confidant and lover.
My greatest fear was a monster, whose only desire is to destroy and dominate. The creature lurked in the shadows while plotting the man’s demise, feeding on anger and alcohol. It has no soul, only two black holes for eyes. It is full of angry flames that burn anything in their path, including the man’s own love. Including me.
The man is perfect and pure without the monster, but he’s lived with the demon so long that he no longer knows who he is without it. The monster learned how to disguise itself in a loving embrace, then attack during moments of vulnerability. It became nearly impossible for me to tell when I was with the man and when I was with a beast in disguise, waiting to dominate, dictate and destroy everything.
And destroy me the monster did.
Every time the beast burned me away, I’d patiently wait for the man, in all his foreseeable brokenness, to return to me when he was ready to be saved. The door was always wide open, as my soul’s yearning for the depth of the man’s love outweighed the pain of the monster’s scorches.
I wanted to save the man from the monster more than I wanted to breathe. My heart was naïve enough to believe its love could be enough to deliver the man from the anger and myself from the fear. I thought that if I walked delicately enough, I could stop the beast’s inner fire from incinerating me alive, and that this sort of love would one day be reciprocated when the monster was finally gone for good.
After nearly a decade of nursing the man’s burns from the monster, I took a quiet moment to examine my own wounds. My skin was so charred from the beast’s destructiveness that I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. In that moment, I knew what I had to do. With shaking hands, knots in my stomach, and a heavy heart, I finally decided to set myself free.
The beautiful man and the purity of our love will always be imprinted on my heart, but the weight of the monster became too much to hold. I had to accept that my love could never relinquish the monster; that was up to the man. And unless the man was ready to permanently remove the beast from himself, I could never have one without the other.
I lost my soul mate, but I had to save myself.
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Jacki Moon is a writer, dreamer and yogi with a rebel soul who currently resides in Colorful Colorado. While she has been a writer for as far back as her memories go, she began taking the craft more seriously in her undergrad years when she got into music journalism. Her ‘Almost Famous’ dreams and hopeless romantic spirit have taken her on many adventures across the nation, and have opened her heart to a love affair with the unknown. She invites you to join her on Twitter to keep up with all of her crazy antics.
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