Wrapped in blue

Subtle are the chains that bind us, woven of fear, and failure, forged in pain and doubt, and bound with hope and faith. It is faith that holds us through the night, keeping lights burning even when the fuel runs out. It is hope that makes us skew a vicious attack into a simple bid for our attention. We train ourselves to look for the good in people, force our eyes to see what might simply not exist. It is this vulnerability with provides the holes to set the hooks that undo us.

There is beauty in believing in good; there is is danger in believing in absolutes. Nobody, I repeat, nobody is all one or the other. This is not Hollywood, where the bad guy carries a creepy mustache and is someone you've never met before. In fact, finding the 'bad guy' might be equated to a 'Where's Waldo?' from the space shuttle--or it might be as easy as looking in the mirror or a sweet photo. Statistics state that we know our abusers, our attackers, our stalkers, and our killers. They are people we know lightly, people we love, and people we marry.

They will use our parents, our pets, our children, our reputations, and our weakness to bring us to heel. They will beg, they will lie, and they will promise to be different. They will fail to deliver. Every time. If they feel threatened, they will begin the cycle anew, pushing farther and farther over the bounds of acceptability, breaking through the conditioned behaviours of civilization until the boundaries are gone and there is nothing left but a body. Once it's realized that a person can be touched without retaliation, that they can be struck or choked or bloodied without a true price being extracted, the course is set. Until there is a cost, there are no boundaries. It is a simple step from speaking words that cut to cutting skin that bleeds. From there it is but a simple thing for rage to turn to violence that leaves marks and love to turn into something that takes a life.

They are the people we trust with our hearts, our lives, and our children. They are people we believe in, and to admit that they might bring harm to us is to admit that maybe, just maybe we were wrong about them. That we have to love ourselves enough to be wrong, and to value ourselves more than someone else. It's so much easier to leave it alone to save yourself the hassle. It is so much easier to believe in the goodness of a killer, isn't it?