She dimmed me so gently I mistook it for soft lighting, not intention.
Every Smiling Face Aint Happy, 2024, Mixed media on wood panel, 24 x 18 x 1 in. Artist: February James Courtesy of Anthony Gallery
Before going to bed Samantha read a quote aloud to me. One from Alice Walker that said “ I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of”. She was quiet after that. I chose not to fill that space with my curosity. My feelings. Or, actually feeling.
She rolled over on her right side and left me staring at her back. I occupied myself or distracted myself rather from my own thoughts by counting the moles on that long stretch of skin that covered her spine. I used my eyeballs like I would a pencil if I were working on a travel size connect the dot puzzle.
One, two, three, fourfivesix.
Are they even puzzles? seven, eight, fourfivesix. Connect the dots?
Is it a puzzle or a game?
I went from one mole to another then i got lost in more thoughts. I kept it light at first trying to distinguish the difference between a mole and a freckle, a freckle and a bump and what caused any of them to be. Then my thoughts got heavier. Was she actually sleeping or quiet? Is she quiet or avoiding? and are we both avoiding saying what’s to hard to feel yet the only thing present, and awake between us?
When we met, she carried a kind of warmth that felt handcrafted. Gentle, attentive, almost reverent. She made it seem like I was entering a sanctuary rather than a relationship. It was flattering at first — the way she noticed everything, the way she framed us as something rare.
She tended to the truth the way someone tends to a bonsai — pruning here, shaping there, cutting away what didn’t serve the vision. She introduced simple and sometimes heavy ideas that felt harmless: there was us, and then there was everyone else. A private universe, carved for two
What I didn’t understand then was that isolation and intimacy can look identical in the beginning.
She wore the only antidote for us to live in the moment, 2024, Watercolor and ink on stretched canvas, 12 x 9 x 3/4 in. Artist: February James - Courtesy of Anthony Gallery
She didn’t lie — she didn’t have to.
She distorted, just slightly.
She bent truths until they resembled shapes that she preferred.
She reinterperted me the way someone misreads a poem:
not because it’s confusing,
but becasue the wrong meaning serves them better.
And she always delivered these reinterpretations softly, like a doctor giving a diagnosis she claims to regret. Concerned. Gentle. Performative.
And with each retelling, she carved away another piece of who I really was.
Her concern became my cage.
She linked my name to choices I never made, hinted at beliefs I never held, denied the history we built together. And the people listening believed her because why wouldn’t they? She spoke like a woman reluctantly revealing the burden of loving someone difficult. Projections. One, two, three, fourfivesix.
I became a story she meticulously curated — a psychological portrait painted in grayscale. Always happy and willing to speak on my behalf. Doused in seeds of vieled accuracy with no intention of ever communicating the facts. The motivation to dismantle the perception of another. Shrank my voice until it fit the script she preferred.
When she spoke about me to others, she used that same calculated softness–concern-as-weapon, empathy-as-alibi. The kind of tone that invites people to believe her because she sounds reluctant to speak at all.
I watched myself fade inside the mythology she built around me, a woman made of omissions and misquotes. My generosity became naivety. My confidence became aggression. My silence became guilt.
As I lay here realizing what has happened to us, her narrative is out there spreading like fog. Thick. Quiet. Hard to argue with.
What I mourned wasn’t the relationship–it was the version of myself I let be rewritten.”
Sometimes the reward isn’t worth the sacrifice, 2024, Mixed media on stretched canvas, 10 x 8 x 3/4 in., Artist: February James, Courtesy of Anthony Gallery
That’s the thing about subtle manipulation: it doesn’t feel like an attack. It feels like someone rearranging the furniture in your mind while you sleep.
One, two, three, fourfivesix.
I no longer wonder what chinese water torture might feel like.
What we had wasn’t a misunderstanding. or distance between us.
It was an unraveling — a slow extraction of truth from a web spun with careful hands.
And when I finally visualize myself stepping outside of her story, the silence begins to feel like oxygen.
seven, eight, nine, ten…
do
not
try
again.