Taking It Back

Taking It Back

I have tried not to hate you. But I do.

Every time she speaks of you, a light comes into her eyes that I cannot put there. And lately it seems that she is looking away from me altogether. As though I have not given her any love at all, as though I don’t know how.

How is this justice? How is this right?

She collects the magazine articles about you. And there are many, as many as your mistakes. I see you in one of them now, another murder attributed to you. Another article about how you’re a soulless psychopath.

And yet we love you… and yet you are the one who fills her eyes with a light I cannot match, no matter what I do. Surely by now she should love me as a daughter would love a father. And yet she saves her love for you.

Should I be more like you, then? Is that what would sway her? If I were cruel? If I were famous for nothing good? Would that make me stand out of the nameless, faceless crowd for her, as you do?

I was, once. I was on the path you have refused to stray from. Perhaps if I had stayed upon it instead of turning away to God, she would love me as much as she loves you.

I was on drugs as a teenager. I stole and hurt people to feed my habit. Does this sound familiar to you? Is this not how your criminal career began? But I turned away and redeemed myself. As you never truly have. As you never will, will you?

You killed Carolyn, and still the girl loves you first. I have watched over her from the first, but you are always first in her heart. You may be cruel, and yet she loves you without care. I am the one who must be tarnished in her eyes, when I deny her things that a girl her age should not have, and which you would give her with careless abandon.

Or is it careless? I have seen the speculative light in your eyes, of late, when you look at her. As though you know the fruit is almost ripe for the picking. Is that your agenda? Is that your one true mission here?

You’re feast or famine for her, either gone for months or an unremitting presence in our lives. She starves for your attention when you’re away, and then gluts herself upon you when you return, spending every moment with you in neglect of her studies, her friends, her life. You arrest her development every time you come in.

She tells me I don’t know how to give love, that I am too strict with her. Perhaps I am, but what is a man to do? She tests me, repeatedly… and then you return and all of the work is lost.

She knows better than to talk about the Burkha with you. She just discards it while you’re home and pretends that she never has to wear it. Walking around with you, her face bared to the world, like one of your whores. Is that what you wish her to become? I think it’s what she wishes.

It is like watching salmon try to spawn. You both have only one mission, and that is her defilement.

I lost the thread. This was not what I meant to write about. Soon it will be irrelevant; you will never find her again. And it is not as though you can read this. I write in Arabic so you won’t know what this says, even if you ever find it. This is for me. To purge this poison you have infected me with.

To take back what you have stolen from me… my soul.

I almost did it. I came so close. The poison was in the food. You would both die in each other’s arms. But I could not do that to her. She will live, and in time she will thrive without you.

It happens tonight. Everything is in place. It’s an auspicious night. For the first time in years, I had a dream of Paradise this morning. I have missed those dreams.

Allah will guide me to your destruction, Richard B. Riddick. Once you are back in prison, all will be well again.

Tonight, I will have her back, and everything else you have taken from me.

God help you.