She lays next to you, the object you always desired. The night is still, and the only sound you hear is the whisper of her breath on your body. It warms you. It chills you. A contradiction, just like everything about her.

It’s impossible for you to know what the right thing to do with her is. Should you remain with her, forever? Should you desert her, never to see her again?

You don’t know, can’t decide or make up your mind. You never do with her. She does this to you, making your life nothing but a contradiction of opposites. She makes you strong, she makes you weak. She makes think you know yourself, she makes you doubt everything you ever do. She brings you calm, she brings you storms. You know you should stay, you know you should leave.

All within a wisp of a moment with her, the barometer of your emotions skyrockets and crashes, back and forth. What do you do with a tempest, if it brings you life as well as turmoil?

She’s all yours now, or so you want to think. Watching her, you want to feel like you finally ensnared the girl that eluded you, finally made her yours.

You want to believe these things, but you know better. No matter how much you think you have conquered her to make her yours, you know deep inside you’ve been snared in her diva’s web. It’s been woven for you and only you, trapping you to her side, forever keeping you at her mercy.

You know there’s no way out, and never was. You know that now, and you knew it then, back when you first met her and had to possess her. Yet still you walked into her lair, just because you thought your desire would contain her. You feel a fool for remaining with her, because you thought you could own her, even when you knew you never would. She tricked you into thinking that you could transform her into your ideal. Knowing she deceived you, why do you stay?

This is why. She always had a power over you that you couldn’t explain. Something addicting, the kind of quality that sinks you deep and makes you think you’ll never have control of your life, ever again. Something essence that tells you that this slippage is a good thing, a rush that is better than any lesson of sanity could ever give you. It was always that way, ever since the day you met her.

It’s impossible for you to break this spell, it seems. You want to, or you say you want to. But every time you try, your soul screams out in agony, as though you’re tearing away a piece of your own body from you. Why would you ever want to do that? Why would anyone?

You’re left thinking, you’re insane for staying with her. But you always stay in the long run, even when you try to leave. Because in the end, you can’t get away from the thought that it’s just as insane to leave. To cut her away from you forever. No decision ever is right, when it comes to her.

How did it all get this way? This is what you think, as you lay next to her. You have spent nights and days with her, and only her. Consumed by her beautiful mask, she has convinced you that nothing else in the world is necessary. Just by her very presence, her very being. A world where just you and she exist in, with no one else to disturb your universe.

What do others say, especially if they suspect you have surrendered your life and being so fully to her that you have forgotten what the world is without her?

This is the wisdom they all warn you with, hoping to convince you to desert her. They say, you are addicted, that you have given your personal power away. They warn, she has taken away your individuality. Others accuse, she has fused your identity with hers.

Perhaps they are right, in a way. For who are you without her? Do you know who you are, anymore? Is the house of your very own soul even sacred anymore, or have you sacrificed it on the altar of desire for her?

Yet, you question, who are these people who say this? If you left her, what would they give you? Would they satiate your every desire, as she does? Or would they leave you bereft and isolated after their criticisms and chastisements, deserting you to fend for yourself, alone? Who are they to tell you that your world with her is incomplete, when they would do nothing to help fill the gap once you leave her?

Because you’ve left her before, many times. You’ve tried to take their advice. There were times you told her goodbye, resolving in your mind to never see her again. You even walked out the door, thinking you were strong enough to leave.

But you always came back, all without her lifting a finger to entice you. Your desire for her was enough. She knew that, and only had to wait for your return. Because you always did, like now.

She always had a hold on you, from the moment you saw her. She wasn’t yours, at least not right away. Another held her heart, and she told you that you had to wait, if you wanted her. She said this with tears in her eyes, holding your hand. You lusted after her even more then, wanting to rescue her from the bonds that held her captive. Damsel in distress that she was, you were helpless to do anything to save her from the pain she seemed unable to lift herself out of.

So helpless she was to herself, that her inertia bled into you like a riverbed cuts into a mountain, slowly weakening even the most powerful peaks. But even knowing this, you waited anyway. She rewarded your effort by collapsing into your arms for a forever that lasted moments at a time. You would do anything to have her, anything to keep her. So you have, and she has let you. She still does.

You know well enough after all this time that your desires are not enough to save her. Even after you have bled yourself dry to feed her wounds, she still sinks with the weakness of her lackluster convictions. She clings to you, bloodsucking your essence dry while feeding your desires just enough to make you want her more.

Is beauty such a drug that you have to die for it? You don’t know. Listening to the song of her breath, your desire for her tells you that you are very much alive. Is poison that delicious when you swallow your death in ecstasy?

Tomorrow, you will try to leave again, you decide as you have decided many times before. You will tell her goodbye once more. You decide this now, knowing that you will feed on her fantasies in her absence, doing nothing but dreaming of her. Absence makes not only your heart grow fonder when she is gone. Lust has a way of pervading dreams when the object can’t disrupt your ideals. You’ll dream of her then, remembering only the first moment you wanted her, and thought you would be able to capture her forever.

And then, like the doomed mate of a black widow spider, you will return to her web to be consumed by her once more. She never has to lift a finger to retrieve you, just as she never has to lift a finger to rescue herself when you are there. You come back. You always do. You feed her your soul, and she lets you think you are the hero that she is obliged to. The cycle will never truly end, no matter what corner of the world you run to hide from her. Because you have sold your soul to her, and there is no refuge for that. Somewhere in your heart, you always stay. Knowing this, why is that you leave, when you never truly do completely?

In the midst of your private turmoil, she stirs next to you as she awakens. She smiles up at you, and you at her. You lean down to kiss her, but she speaks first, telling you what you know to be true, what you want in your deepest heart to hear every time.

“You will always be mine.”