Justified Murder

Writing left me for a really long time, or more likely, I left it.

I met writing in college and I became immediately infatuated. Like any good love story, I wasn’t quite sure if writing was the one for me. It was ambiguous and no one in my life carried on a relationship with its kind.

Could writing give me the life I wanted? To be honest I never asked myself this question because when I was with writing it felt too good. This type of good could not be real.

Ingrained in me was the concept that you don’t pick the ferociously magnificent thing to spend your life with. You pick the steady and safe thing. The thing that won’t leave you sleeping alone at night in a bed that’s too big in a house that’s mortgaged.

I’m talking about love and work.

Writing was scary. When I looked into its eyes, for the first time I could see myself. They were a different shade of blue than mine but in them, I could see my outline, a better outline than the one that existed. Writing saw the best version of me.

This outline detailed curves of bravery and a mouth that spoke real words.

Like the love stories, I did not marry my big love the first time around. I moved away and went to the arms of safe and easy. Safe and easy is what got me into a 9-5 job and at first safe and easy sounded really good.

The beginning of my relationship with safe and easy was wonderfully ordinary. I did not have to worry about what I wanted out of life because safe and easy had already made that decision for me. Safe and easy wore the pants in the relationship and caught me during that shameful phase of my life where I didn’t claim being a feminist.

Along the normal progression of a love story, safe and easy eventually died and that’s when writing and I started hooking up again. You can fill in this series of events as you wish. Maybe, safe and easy got hit by a car while bicycling or died of a massive heart attack. Or, my favorite option, I poisoned his morning smoothie and buried him in the backyard.

I like that idea the best because I took my power back.

Unsurprisingly, safe and easy was having an affair. Actually, he was sleeping with every woman in the neighborhood and every person who was willing to settle for less than stellar. This would explain why our hours together in the evening were so unsatisfying.

Safe and easy was completely exhausted from spreading himself so thin.

I know, shagging the neighbor is not justification for murder but my rage was immeasurable. What started as small feelings of dissatisfaction grew to all-consuming feelings of aggression.

I caught myself daydreaming about his demise. Maybe I could plunge a knife through his heart when he was droning on about how people like me don't get a better life.

When my fantasies began to run away with me, I knew it would have to be me or safe and easy.

The two of us could not continue a life together. Luckily for me, it was safe and easy that I chose to get rid of.

Some evenings I worry that safe and easy was not dead when I put him into the earth. Maybe he unburied himself in the late hours of the night and is readying himself to get even with me. Sometimes I catch him in my peripherals standing dripping with mud waiting to take my life back.

I’ve shared these worries with writing and he suggested that we build a garden atop safe and easy’s grave. If his heart still is beating beneath the soil a layer of thick roots from blooming plants will hopefully be enough to keep him down.

Or maybe, safe and easy is quite dead and my fears are not powerful enough to rapture him from his grave.

I am grateful to safe and easy for showing me the love I have for writing and my creative self. He has moved on to his afterlife to serve a greater purpose. Safe and easy will be the foundation upon which I build a beautiful life filled with flowers and words.