I know whether this goes. I've done it before, lived with my lover. I'm so stealth in my everyday life even I can forget, my coworkers think I'm just a little dramatic but very kind. It's easy with them, they're never close in the first place and I'm important enough to be both ignored and irreplaceable. I'm happy there, and well known, And when I go home all the rot can spill out of my lips. It can stain my bed and fill my dog's empty bowl. It can ruin all the clothes I bought to feel pretty, so I could be part of society without a single damning word. That by being thin, and pretty, and blonde, and blue eyed I can be more valuable and thus more tolerable. I can be completely silent and still belong. It's always shocked my how important my looks are to how far people go with me, how much they are willing to love me... But once it's not in doses, one I come home to them and the rot spills on them, everything changes. They quickly do the math on what a lifetime with me means, exactly, and while some are slow and some are fast, they all go. There are prettier girls, and happier ones too. Ones whose smile is just a smile, and not a dam holding back plague.

But she was never like that. She saw it from day one, we meet in therapy where all of that spilled out for the first time in public. She saw it and she smiled in a way I still can't parse. It was like a spell, and I told myself that I knew where it's going. So I'd just be her friend. I'd just let it all run its course at a safe distance.

Of course we fell in love anyway. In the most toxic way she traded her abusive ex husband for me, and at the time what a win it must have looked like to her! It was still easy to pretend I was fixed. It was so, so, so easy to carefully hide away all the rot. I could stash it in boxes under the bed, I could invent new stories for the old heartbreaks kept inside momentos. I could put on the jeans she likes and the tops I like and just be hers.

But she'll see it. She's seen it before like vomit, discreet and tragic but still beautiful. The way a cherished loved one looks vulnerable and appealing when sick with flu. She's never seen it fill the room to the roof, never seen me float on the sewage. I can sanitize so much, I've learned how and through careful administered doses of hate I can clean the evidence, but little by little it will overcome my methods. I'm alone in the fight, and she's promised to stand by me but how many have? I love that promise, maybe because it's so familiar, because I know the 48 days of joy that follow it. It really doesn't take long for people to figure out the math, though, to realize what this world of rot is really worth.

But we're doing it anyway, because I love her ferociously, and restlessly, and hungrily. I need her like I need food on the occasional I allow myself to have it. And I know she'll see. And I know I'll be back here soon, alone, in my well kept queendom of rot.

Her smile is so beautiful. I'm sure I'll write something praise worthy when the rot strangles it and turns her blue. When she leaves me just so she can breathe again.

I don't know what to do. I'm armed to the teeth to fight but I've already lost.