Hey Jealousy

I have the time now to unload your burden here. So unceremoniously have you yoked it all on me. And so subtly.

Yet, to my misfortune, I read you. You try to keep your envy from me either for consideration of me or some hidden cunning. But I read you dear man, none the less. You fear me with your lady.

I can feel your envy. I have anticipated it, to be sure. Your history with her was never hidden from me. I shunned hearing its details at times, but I am peripheral to the plot. An extra. So it came to me piecemeal. I have more or less a full account.

Some of the details you yourself provided me, despite your discreet ways. But that was before. When I was an extra.

I am not that anymore am I? You don't know where to place me. Center perhaps? I have no knowledge of that myself. I only feel how you perceive me now.

I feel your green eyes. They are underwrought penknives, sharp enough to slice skin and flesh yet imbued with dullness that would frustrate any effort for a clean cut. You try to reach my mind sloppily disgorging sinew and vein from the back of my neck. You try to enter through those nodes below my ear, at the back of my jaw.

Will you be content to learn that there was nothing?

You are green. Even your opening joke suggested affairs that I have not engaged in. Your gaiety was an ill mask. It hid not your faltering voice from me. It hid not your uncertain accusation of my betrayal.

Will you be content to learn that there was nothing?

I had full control of my faculties. All the charms you attribute to me, I left home. It was easy for me to shed them. For me, they never existed in the first place. Charms are nothing but the mistaken perception of people.

They see in me what they would like to see. Read in me what they would like to fathom.

Will you be content? There was nothing.

What did you like me to be my friend? Your scapegoat? The reason for your failure? I was not. In me there is and never was anything. You could not touch me with your knives. You could not wring or extract guilt from my innards.

I did not cause it. You failed. At your fall, I was absent. I beg your leave, for I had my own dive to manage. And I state this now to further blunt your blades, I never betrayed you. You had no claim on her. She is, to you (and most importantly, to her), a might-have-been.

And rest easy my friend for I also hold no claim. And not ever, I suppose. I divulged the details of my fall to her as she did to me hers (and yours). To her now, I am blackened. Ugly, inside out. And I would not feel safe any other way.

Partake of this security if you so desire. But I beg you not to. Seek your refuge elsewhere. The chapter you almost shared with her is best left closed.

And keep your green eyes to yourself.

Be content. I am nothing.