The Neglected

how it came to be this way, s/he just can’t believe--- as the cliché goes, “it seems like just yesterday” that they had been rolling, bouncing, drilling in the hay & yet, s/he wasn’t spared what others told him/her would be the inevitable--- for soon, interest in the rolling, the bouncing & the drilling to the heights of that once compassionate bond between the two of them, on the part of her/his still significant other, faded & dissipated away, to the point where the suggestion of separate rooms was made, for “it really is easier to sleep in a bed alone, honey,” s/he was told quickly. increasingly embarrassed as the days go by, to have to walk that long hallway in order to knock on the door of her/his past-lover who is now simply a housemate, to ask for the scraps of intimacy that may be left, that might be allotted to him/her before it has all washed away entirely, s/he starts to change her/his look, s/he gets a different hairstyle & s/he starts to become receptive to those around him/her that might want more than a chat by the fax machine or a stroll outside the facility after lunch--- where it will go, where it can go, nobody knows, but one can believe that s/he feels guilty, because that good ol’ christian upbringing has instilled in him/her a complex, which hid his/her own sexuality for so many years & now it spreads inside like the most rampant of cancers, beating against the walls inside her/his brain, that s/he must be devoted, that s/he must do what s/he must in order to keep a “happy” home, that s/he must deny her/his own body, that s/he mustn’t indulge during the only life that s/he has & so, just around the bend is not only the end of a “relationship,” but also the end of a “faith,” one that should have been dead long ago & the neglected lover, the neglected believer, will no longer be neglected. once s/he puts her/his foot down & walks away from it all.