Rapunzel in Dear love

Dear love,

You stir in me.

The way a parasitic larva coils in the guts of its host, you tickle my insides. Nothing I do seems to pull you off the wall of my gut so I can shit you out. Instead, I’m fed the toxins you’ve laced into the food you fed our friends.

What a tasty meal you prepare. You spin your webs and pulls your lies and spread the disease of your control. I see you, isolating another human, pulling her away from the world. I am witnessing the next victim and all I can do is smile and wait until she goes running, seeking a tower to hide in. You make princesses in your wake.

How many people are you going to harm in your quest for not being your abuser? Can’t you see how you twist people into the worst versions of themselves? Contort them until you’ve isolated them from their support, from their friends, from their people. Chase them into the tower and then tell them they must let their hair down to you.

It was how you clambered up to me. I thought you were clumsy but now I see you wanted to appear incapable. You were the solitary voice that drowned out the others, told me to ignore the bodies in the bushes. How desperately I needed a witch then.

You did your work well. I have to commend you on how thorough you were. I barely escaped with any part of me intact, and instead now I keep wondering if I’m still in that tower. The space around me feels small and I can still feel the scars on my skin of the lessons you carved into me. I looked at those bodies and I wept for who they were, what they had meant to me, and how very dead they were.

This tower, is it real? Am I here or am I free? Have I found a way out that did not involve your manipulation or am I still stuck within? Is the tower me? Or did you create it from bricks of lies and mortar of cruelty?

I never should have cut the hair you loved so much just to feel free of you. Now I worry there is no way down.

Regards,
The cabbage