Trust Falls

Trust. Hard to acquire, easy to lose.

I trust very easily, too easily in most cases. I am the person who walks into a room of strangers and who will have twenty new friends at the end of the evening. I have no issue being strikingly forthright about myself, being uncategorically and daringly open and I think that encourages that in others. I always say that you will have my trust until you lose it, but when it is lost it is lost forever.

I have in the past been powerfully assailed by instincts which I have intellectualised and ignored, most of them having to do with lying. I can sense a falsehood as palpable as a scent in the air. It is my stomach that roils and flips, a sense of dread that touches my shoulders, that same feeling you experience in the back of your calves when you see a child about to fall and hurt themselves.

I feel it now. I feel it and it is unbalancing me, hurting me, making me cross and disagreeble. I want to put my head in someone’s lap and cry my heart out. I want to bite something until it bleeds. I want to be stronger and better than I am. I want to have the courage to give up, to walk off the playing field with the game unfinished.

I want so much not to care.

He rang me in the middle of the night last night, two o’clock in the morning. We’d spoken at eleven, he was finding parking near his place and was shovelling it out after our hideous snowstorm. When we had rung off, he was going home to watch a film and sleep.

Woken out of a dead sleep I asked him where he had been. He said at a friend’s house. He sounded stoned. What friend? You don’t know them.

It happened then. I felt it. My skin was suddenly on fire, my scalp tingling with sweat. With my history, and with all the lies and the shit and the fucking hideous break-me-in-two pain I endured I told myself that the next time I felt this I would run far and run fast. We spoke a bit and I openly  asked him what he was keeping from me, what was wrong. Nothing, he said.

Wrong fucking answer. I am disappointed, and oh so angry.

"I wonder that you value my trust so little that you would risk losing it forever."

I rang off and we have not spoke today. Maybe I am looking for an excuse, I don’t know. But I am worth much more than the way I feel right now.