There’s a well known saying…”rather the devil you know than the devil you don’t…”
Perhaps I had never fully comprehended it until I was much older and realized that if I were to be swept up into a battle, I’d rather it be a battle that I am well skilled in than one I have never encountered.
Taking that into the realm of love, the type of love that is written about, immortalized in poetry and fiction…it could mean so many different things. I always assumed that for me, it related to my patterns and how I mostly went for males with a similar temprement…
It was probably just yesterday, 7 months after my break up that I fully comprehended what it actually meant for me and what I still believe is one of the greatest love stories ever to have occurred…the story of my Narc and I…
He may have been devilish at times, I fully blame his mental illness and traumas, I don’t care if that means I am making excuses for him, at least not right now in this moment…
Whatever the problems, the pain and sometimes the unbearable environments that he created for me and for us…I knew him…and he knew me…and for all the madness he represented, he was also everything stable to me.
He possessed everything I had ever wanted…and in equal measure, everything I did not and should not have…a trick of fate if ever there was one! My destiny…my purpose…my happiness…also my demise???
Months have gone by, many break ups, many make and so many horrible and unforgivable interactions later and all I know is that I love him as much as I did then, maybe even a little more.
I’ve been trying to move on, seeing other people and doing my best to let it go, let him go…but it is not because I want to! I never wanted any of this not even when my safety depended on it! I find myself wondering if he did it because it was the only way he could protect me? His last and most sacrificial act of love, was to let me go?
Maybe I am romanticizing something that I should not, but there is not a part in me that believes our connection and history is anything less than a tragedy orchestrated by the likes of Shakespeare!!
I don’t want to hate him, I don’t want to feel bitter…but I also want to leave this spot I’ve been stuck in for such a long time…if not for me than maybe for him? Maybe I need to go so that he can move on too? Yes I know, why do I assume that he hasn’t?
I suppose I don’t…but that feeling in me that has never been wrong about what he was doing screams out to me that he is struggling as much as I am…albeit in a different way. And I don’t want that for him…he may be the devil in this story…but he was my monster to fall in love with, and my heart accepted his fate…as it did my own!
‘Rather the devil you know than the devil you don’t’, they say!
The devil knew how to touch me, what made me laugh and smile, what made me cry. He made me feel, pleasant and unpleasant…but he knew exactly how to evoke all emotions in me! We were best friends, lovers, partners…we were also mortal enemies…
Perhaps our fates really were entangled in those first few moments…we never really knew how important it would be to our story ..maybe it always was…
Over a decade ago, when our eyes met for the first time and we instantly despised each other with no real reason…I should have known that he was my shadow selves mirror and I his…and we represented everything that we both could and could not be to the other…
Overwhelmed with admiration while consumed with hatred…
Taylor Swift said it best…
“The story of us sounds a lot like a tragedy…”


