A Poisoned Pen

“Dear Victim,

That greeting is now more applicable than ever as you are now about to experience my devaluation of you. Why am I doing this? Well, there is the void inside of me. I know it is there and I can feel it. It makes me feel restless, then weak, then as if I am collapsing in on myself, being consumed by the black hole that sits at the centre of my being.

The only way I know how to stop this happening is to fill up on emotional content from other people and in particular you. The more emotional attention I get, so much the better. The terror of oblivion soon vanishes and then the weakness fades. It does not take too long for the sensation of restlessness to evaporate and then I am on the up once more. I feel empowered, omnipotent and capable of anything.

The more of this emotional content that keeps coming my way then the greater my sense of power becomes, the greater my capability to achieve and I am then that which I know myself to be. That weakened individual is not me. That is just the product of the cruelties of the world that have been heaped up against me.

That is the outcome of the malice and treachery that I have to deal with. That is what created that weak individual and I do not recognise him. He has no standing with me and I banish him so readily when I receive the emotional attention which I am entitled to. You once were really, really good at giving me this emotional attention. You did it in a positive way.

You loved me in a way that nobody else has done (at least so far as in that I care to remember) and I know that you still love me but there is something different now and the void is making its presence known more than it ought to and certainly more than I want it to. I know what to do though. I always know what to do. I need to flick the switch and now cause that torrent of negative emotional attention to come from you. It is easily done.

I know lots of ways of doing it. What makes it even better is that the change from adoration to abhorrence is so marked, such a contrast that your reaction is increased, magnified and boosted. This means all the more of your negative emotional reactions for me to drink in. I have a toolkit full of various manipulations. I have been using some of the tools on you already, although you were so blinded by the brilliance of my seduction you did not notice.

It will be different now. Some of the tools are very subtle and you will have no idea that I am controlling you. Others are pretty brutal and you won’t be able to miss them. I wish you hadn’t changed but it has happened. I don’t delight in doing this you know; I just have to do it. It is necessary for my survival and I am of course more important than you, or at least, that is what I keep telling myself. After all, that has to be true hasn’t it? If you were more important than me, you would not find yourself in this situation would you?

You wouldn’t be about to face systematic abuse which will leave you hurt, upset, bewildered, exhausted, worried, anxious, terrified, puzzled and near broken. I’m not the one who is going to suffer. You are. You might consider this a punishment for failing to keep up the correct standard of emotional attention that I need.

If you do, so be it. Punishment or not, it has to happen because I have to fill that void. Being able to extract such negative emotional attention from you stands as a true measure of my power over you and this is what all of this is about, power. I have to feel powerful because if I do not then I vanish and I do not want that to ever happen. I have realised that the only way that I am able to feel powerful is by harnessing the emotional responses of other people and yours most of all. I suppose you do have some importance then don’t you, just not as much as me.

Don’t take it personally. I have done this to plenty of other people like you. I thought they would prove effective in providing me the emotional attention but despite my best endeavours, careful selection and giving nature, they still malfunctioned. It is very disappointing. In order to fix the situation, I need to change the nature of my interaction with you so that I hurt you.

There are thousands of ways of doing this. I may call you names, I may stop having sex with you, I may punch you, I may take your money away, I may stop you seeing your friends, I may just stand and stare at you, I may stop speaking to you, I may disappear, I may have an affair well probably more than one, I may not offer any help to you around the house, I may hide your possessions, I may smash things up, I may disagree with you repeatedly and so much more. There are so many different ways to extract that negative emotional attention.

Think of it like a torturer just trying to extract information. He does not care about who you are, he just wants his goal; the information. I am just the same. You do not matter to me. I am not doing this because of who you are, it is what you have failed to do and my goal is to get your negative emotional attention and to do so repeatedly.

It’s not all bad news though. I will flick the switch and be delightful to you again and provide you with some respite from my seemingly ceaseless horrible behaviour. Don’t be mistaken and think that I am doing that because I care about you or because I have suddenly seen the error of my ways.

I know you and others like you see my ways as wrong, but I seem them as necessary. I will offer you some respite so you don’t leave until I decide it is time for you to go. I do it because I feel that the contrasting positive fuel that you will provide – the relief, the joy, the thanks – will serve me well in filling the void. I don’t expect it to last but it will at least stop you from leaving me and allow you some form of recovery before I flick the switch once more and away we go again.

You can expect this to go on for as long as I can keep drawing sufficient emotional attention from you. Back and forth we will go. One day good. The next bad. The next good. The next two bad. It will leave you completely baffled, confused and deranged but that suits me fine. That way you won’t be able to think straight. I do not want you making any calm and rational decisions. Heavens no, you might actually work out what I am and decide to get away from me and I cannot have my supremacy and authority challenged in that manner. I say when things happen around here.

I would say sorry for what is about to happen but eventually you will realise that I rarely say that word and if I do I never mean it. I just use it as another way of getting what I want. That’s a fact. It just the way I am. Deal with it. Well, I suppose I had better open up the toolkit and select the first dark instrument to use against you because I am starting to feel restless already and something needs to be fed.

With mechanical action

N.Arc x”