My Placebo or Yours?

Relationships are built on lies.

We shack up with whatever sad soul will take our half-perfect selves into their half-perfect little home, and immediately learn to resent them for it - for recognizing our flaws, for having their own, and for keeping us locked up in such a small, stuffy space.

Eventually, this resentment builds: we forget to love; we lash out; we attempt to please them to death. We abandon our morals, our values, our interests and causes - wiping the slate clean, so to speak - and we start anew. We rebuild ourselves into the ultimate killing machine: the boyfriend/girlfriend of our partners' dreams. They quickly come to recognize the attack, and retaliate with an equal and opposite assault on your own image of the 'ideal partner'. This means war.

One day we find ourselves knee-high in spilt blood, the death toll rising up about our ears, the wounded crying out for deliverence, for apocalypse. And so we give in. We lower the red flag. We wave the white. We confess.

The treaty is drawn up, the war is over, the dead are reborn and the wounded are healed. But the peace between us and our significant others is awkward and alienating. We cease to interact, to even risk a glance in the direction of the other. The lies that polished us into just what we were expected to be caused nothing but suffering for either party. But in revealing the truth, in scribbling our names into the paper of that treaty, we destroyed the one thing that ever held us together.

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I am nothing but a placebo to my own placebo.