Spiral

How much they wanted to help and how much they could not help. 

Paranoid, semi-depressed me.

Tact and tricks were what they tried first. Then they mingled it with honesty. Then reprimands. And now, only silence. 

Their words were falling on, not necessarily deaf ears, but on a twisted, self-defeating hyperbole of thoughts and imagination and fears and cowardice and laziness.

I had been wronged for no reason and so now I wanted that same magic in reverse, in my favor. I never put it that way to anybody of course. Nonetheless, that was what I wanted. Demanded. In silence. In crunched up fists of hair and pain. In trickles of tears I watched flow saltily down my face. In the spasms of hate I felt towards benign objects.

And since I had never had anything to do with magic, personally, professionally or any other -ly, it was someone else's job to provide it. do it. And we all know who that someone else is.