Enemies

It’s been a slow realization. But no less shocking for the gentle way it has hit me.

But I have enemies.

People who don’t like me. People who snipe about me behind my back. People who plot and talk and actively seek opportunities to bring me down.

Some of you may shrug. Some of you may live and work in environments where this is the norm. Some of you may have immured yourself in a den of poisonous vipers so long ago that you now see such acid writhing as part and parcel of normal existence. Living with daggers aimed at your back is as normal as the sunrise.

For me it is a relatively new thing.

Up to a few years ago I considered myself to be someone who operates as peaceably and as harmoniously with my surroundings as possible. I naturally gravitate towards peace and appeasement. I don’t like making waves or being in the midst of stormy seas. Life is too short to contend with such unnecessary stress.

Over the last few years though I have slowly awoken to the fact that I exist alongside those whose methods of behaviour and operation are diametrically opposed to mine; opposed to my sense of right and wrong. This fundamental opposition alone, I suppose, has drawn the line in the sand for me and for them. Mistrust grows fat on itself and is forever hungry and whines its complaints to both sides.

It is not a nice environment to find yourself living in. I don’t relish it. I don’t feed off it as others do.

But I have amazed myself by surviving. By weathering the various storms that my enemies have regularly blown up for me.

And it has had a curious effect. I am no longer scared. No longer scared to stick my head above the parapet. No longer scared to stick with what I think is right even in the face of opposing demands. They have done their worst and I am still here. I am still me.

More than that I have discovered that I have a loyal support network around me to combat these cowardly would-be assassins.

It might shock my enemies to learn that there is no sniping, no bitching, no plotting that they have ever undertaken that I have not known about and not known who the authors were.

People talk. People snipe. But mostly they talk and snipe about those who do the talking and the sniping.

My response is and always will be to carry on as normal. To live to the best of my abilities and to work as professionally as I can. Dignity does not care if we like someone or not or if we are liked or not. It merely demands a certain mode of behaviour.

We sell our dignity down the river at a cost only to ourselves.

To my enemies then, I say this: carry on as you are; smile to me, offer fake camaraderie whilst badmouthing me behind my back. I know who you are and every word that you say.

When I smile back at you it isn’t because I like you or wish to appease you. Not anymore.

It is because you cannot touch me. It is because, really, genuinely, you do not matter.

Sniping The Snipe

The Snipe is clever.

The Snipe is patient.

It waits by the kettle, by the radiator, by the computer monitor occasionally ticking its eye like an ancient lizard. It is in for the long haul. It plays the long game. It plays to win.

It waits for its prey with a lipstick smile and the bat of an eyelash. It lures its victim in with a sticky tongue of kind words, of sweetness, of sugary betrayal. It offers the sharpened claws of fake friendship. The piercing tooth of confidence.

Once you are in its cooing clutches it sucks out every intimacy, every near silent secret.

It doesn’t digest. It doesn’t consume.

It stores them away. It stockpiles them. Hardens them into little balls of armour shattering ammunition. While the world sleeps the Snipe is up all night making bullets.

Being a coward, afraid of its own dirty work, it offers these to a greater power. With instructions of where lies its victims palpitating heart.

It has no mercy. But it will offer a shoulder to cry on so that it may take suck again. Its appetite is insatiable.

But some of us are prepared. Some of us have been bitten before and have learned from the bites.

Some of us also wait.

Cleverly.

Patiently.

Waiting for the Snipe to look up and smile and catch our eye. Waiting for the Snipe to gulp in fear as it realizes we are blinking at it like smarter lizards through the steady lens of a telescopic rifle.

It will not hear the shot ring out.

It will not feel the impact.

It will not understand the cheers of jubilation.

But it will recognize the bullet.

Poisoned Pen Pal

I must congratulate you on your penmanship. Every curlicue and flourish is so expertly performed. The ink smooth and satin fine. I don’t know what pen you use but it must glide across the page without any friction at all. The lightest, most deftest touch.

Every word on the surface there to soothe and comfort and assist.

Your sentences constructed so artfully make you appear essential and crucial to all operations. Whatever would we do without you? You have shoehorned yourself beneath your writing desk and appear immovable. One of the fixtures and fittings.

But I have turned over the page. I have taken a look at your ink strokes from the back.

The side where it bleeds through black, black, black. The side where the paper is punched and ripped; where your hate-filled pressure has perforated the bleached wood pulp like claw marks in flesh.

Here one can see the almost cuneiform cut of your lettering. The short sharp slashes of invective that lurk beneath the niceties. The subtle jibes that lie behind the acts of support.

I know how you work. How you compose your dark poetry.

Your sunny hand builds scaffolding, lays foundations, holds itself open to be taken or to offer advice and help.

But your true hand, your wizened crone hand, is black with dirt and tar from where you’ve been digging; from where you’ve been tunnelling under the protective walls of those who you profess to befriend; from where you have been literally undermining them, pulling the ground out from beneath them.

No wonder your ink stinks of brimstone.

I think I would respect you more if you were more honest in your machinations; if you didn’t prettify or disguise your siege engines with lipstick or the blush of friendship. It would be better if you let your nastiness shine forth au naturel; if you signed your letters with your true hand. Your blackened hand.

Because we all recognize your penmanship now. The disguise, the pretence is pointless. The affectations, the blonde moments, the senior moments, the gauche moments... we know they are distraction techniques. Fake similes. Oxymorons.

The central metaphor of your life is rotten.

We can smell it a mile away.

And so now, we confer. We discuss. We compare notes. We compile lists.

We write letters of our own.

Letters which we will send to you.

We hope you recognize the ink.

It is black,

black,

black...