A Trust Betrayed A

When absolute trust is betrayed absolutely,

when a twenty-five year history, a pledged lifetime, and a warm place in the family heart are abandoned tearlessly

with a slow shrug and flat toneless words, drifting without articulation from between tight lips,

"I don't love you anymore. I don’t know if I ever did."

Maybe you drop into a block of granite,
crack hard immobility and black rock blindness?

After eternity,
granite fades to fog,
a chunky igneous fog.

You emerge,
incrementally,
from the gelatinous haze,
imbedded crystals scraping you clean but raw.
The fog clings, cuts, and scrapes, resisting your coming out,
a sloth slowly slipping into lighter black, darkest grey,
thinking every day, “Things are really starting to clear up."


Looking back from weeks later and clearer still, the former fog--thick, heavy, and lowering--no longer passes for the clarity it seemed. Trying to see further back is impossible, impenetrable.

Further back in the black granite fog, cold and inorganic, the scrapings of your skin, blood, heart, and hopes are drying on the lightless crystalline flecks, petrifying in the frigid, igneous, heart of absolute betrayal.

You cannot see the way clearly, how you emerged, how you even knew the way.

What odds a miracle?
What’s the proportionate expression?
What’s the chance you emerged self-powered?

A fractional ratio: zip over none.