The Hostess
You can't eat here.
Nothing could keep my enemies from banging at my door. No deadbolt was strong enough. I could hear them shouting on the other side, demanding to be let in. Who knows what they wanted—sex, warmth, company, or something more. More often than not, they could infiltrate my home with one carefully chosen word. One "please forgive me," or a couple of "I love you's." The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch with one of them. I was cooking for them. I was sleeping with them. The call was coming from inside the house.
No one else unlocked that door but me. No one else wrapped their sweaty palm around that metal knob but my hungry hands. My fingers desperate to touch something besides my books and my tarot cards and myself. This was only a reflection of how my heart had allowed me to be beaten down by life, people, love and how parched my body was because of it.
Imagine you’ve been walking through a desert for three days. Your throat feels like sandpaper, your gut is a hollow cave, and the baby hairs on your forehead are stuck to your skin through sweet, salty sweat. After being on your own without food and water, a strange traveler finds you in a desolate space. This person is riding a camel, looking down at you with a bottle of water in his hands. You beg, “Please, sir, may I have some of your water?”
He replies, “Yes, but only under one condition.”
“Yes, yes, whatever you want!” you say. “Please, just give me some water.”
He smiles upon your sun-beaten face and warns, “This will quench your thirst, but it will also make you sick.”
You are more likely to eat from a poisonous hand when your belly is a ravenous monster. I kept trying to build boundaries outside of myself. I would tell a person what I wanted, what I didn’t want in hopes they would abide by these rules. Unfortunately, these are just wind, these are just words, these are only whispers against a roaring sea. These are white flags waved at werewolves who arch their backs to the moon and laugh. Spoken words mean nothing to a pair of claws. Boundaries built on breath alone crumble before the hunger of those who never planned to honor them.
My heart is a beautiful thing. Pumping all of this red juice into and through my veins, filling me up like a proper Koolaid pitcher. It’s the juice of addicts. It’s the smell that attracts a hundred sharks circling around you like ring around the Rosie. It’s the thump, thump, thump a vampire hears on the other side of the door. And she has been my worst nightmare. The heart is the dumping ground for what the mind refuses to carry. The heart will willfully endure what the mind deems silly, useless and infantile. The separation between the two is the nothing but a tale of siamese twins. One wants one thing and the other wants something entirely different; both attempting to live out what they find to be most beneficial. You must refuse the heart to build boundaries within. Just as you must refuse the mind a certain strain of thoughts so you remain in control of your actions.
To refuse the heart and tame the mind is to lock the door and throw away the key, to keep the call inside silent, no matter how sweetly it pleads. Refusing the heart means holding back the hand that reaches for poison. Refusing the mind means silencing the whisper that says, ‘It’s all you deserve.’ Together, they learn to listen, not lead.
There was a man in my life that I loved very much. I still do. I realized that I couldn’t say no to him. I hated how I could easily bend at every whim, take every call, forgive at the first, ‘Sorry.’ Waving the white flag wasn’t working. I had to build the boundary with myself, not him. I didn’t have a set of rules that I lived by. I had to set these rules as the fence that surrounded this metaphorical restaurant.
My Rules:
1.) You are not allowed to open the door if they call you names.
2.) You are not allowed to open the door if they don’t do what they said they were going to do.
3.) You are not allowed to open the door if this person lies.
These are just a few examples.
I had to make rules within self. And then you would show these set of rules to said person and give them back the control.
Example: “If you refer to me in that manner, you will not have contact with me. It’s up to you on how you want this to go.”
I had to give the “control” back to them. But my rules never changed. And if their behavior didn’t either, then I was not allowed to open the door. These rules became immovable. They were etched in stone, and no one could change them-not even me. What I did was I tricked my brain to treating the relationship as a metaphorical establishment. It has rules, code, a dress code and if someone can’t follow these, then they can’t come inside. It was almost as if I was taking a third party approach, working for myself as another entity.
“Sorry, buddy. I don’t make the rules, I just work here.”
I’m not saying I will never break them again. I’m not even saying I’ve perfected them. But while on a mission to implement these standards, these are the ones I have set. Not for anyone else, but for myself. It’s not about your relationship with other people. It’s about the relationship you have with yourself. You are your own boss. You have employed your brain to make decisions. It has not employed you. And if it feels like it has, then it has enslaved you. And you will never get a metaphorical paycheck this way. The kicker is you’ll never get fired, but you’ll have to live with the patrons that eat at your restaurant and your boss will always resent you.
When you have low self worth or people have treated you less than, you subconsciously, allow your boundaries to be taken advantage of because it’s that parched throat that keeps the poison in business. You can trick yourself into acting as almost a third-party employee for your heart. You will be pushed to find other ways of quenching this thirst besides drinking the water from the guy on the camel. I’ve learned that not every knock deserves an answer, not every thirst needs quenching, and sometimes the greatest strength is in letting the door stay closed.