Lex talionis: Excerpt from an unfinished thought

Nine days after I thought he'd broken my heart, I finally found the words to describe how I felt, buried in a musty magazine I’d found in his cluttered office, its cover torn and missing. It had been a pseudo-intellectual magazine once, of literature, politics, culture and the arts; now its pages were yellow and harsh, stained by coffee rings and spilled liquid dried brittle.

I'd taken in those days to making art out of my words, typing and printing adolescent poetry, slicing the paper intentionally uneven, pasting it to poster board, eventually framing it to give to my father as a gift.

I did it that day too, the day I found those two words. I typed and bolded and italicized. I printed and sliced and pasted them into a date book that had become the creative diary of my life, full of curly, coded doodles and advertisements for alcohol cut out from not-so-intellectual magazines.

Lex talionis.

I liked the way it sounded. It made me swallow my helplessness. It gave me faith that I too had the power to hurt. It would come; he’d taught me well.