Sugar

by Mia Ballard

My transformation wasn't for love; it was a sacrifice on the altar of compromise, a slow, insidious erasure of my identity. The realization of his infidelity is a perverse liberation, a permission slip signed in betrayal that frees me from the self-imposed shackles. I no longer feel the need to dim my own light to match his dull glow. The pain of betrayal is sharp, but it cuts the ties that bind me to this charade of a marriage.

The promise of sex is a currency devalued by his infidelity, each dalliance a withdrawal from the bank of my patience, until now, when I'm overdrawn and bankrupt of fucks to give.

Love, for all its beauty, is fragile. It can slip through your fingers or be buried under the lemon tree in your backyard.

I looked up at Tom the Delivery Man and his face looked like what I imagined God would look like.

Every delivery person is a God.

I had managed to disappoint a man to the point where he questioned the very foundations of his feelings. If nothing else, that should be my superpower. In that moment I had concluded that I would always be someone men wanted, but never wanted to keep.

This is how I viewed love: not just as the most important thing, but as the singular narrative thread weaving through the tapestry of my life. It was a strange, almost clinical obsession, a need to have my identity mirrored and validated by the man who occupied my thoughts.

Love, for me, was an endless cycle of rebirth and death; each man a phoenix rising from the ashes of the last, burning brightly before succumbing to the inevitable. And I, ever the devoted keeper of these flames, continued to mark my life with their passage, a perennial witness to both conflagration and smoldering ruin.