Of spiders, webs and intricate snares

"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 - 1832)

She's got a face; I found out that day, that she had a face. Not that I thought she was headless, or faceless or had a huge hole where her head should have been, I just never imagined her with a face that’s all.

It wasn’t a mirror, neither was it on the wall. It was an email with 163kb worth of attachments I had no prior warning, got the ping to say 'I got mail' scanned for viruses, spyware and adware, 23kb worth of attachments given the all clear. And there she is staring me straight in the eyes, a close up, a full frontal view and a half body shot to show off the jugs. In one she was smiling, in the other she was frowning, and in the rest she struck a defiant pose as if to say 'sowatcha gonnae do??????'

Not that I was going to reach out through the computer screen and punch her perfect almost Eurocentric nose out of line, but I had spent 7 bloody months wondering how she looked like, almost to the point of obsession. I used to wonder if she was fat or she was slim, if she was pretty, stunning or just plan ugly. Not that it would have made a difference or given her or me a defence. Part of me wants to call her the other woman, but that would be lying, for she calls me too the other woman. But to be fair with all the hoo-ha and the palaver that has surrounded out three way relationship, like the earth our positions have rotated, so much so that somehow the lines got blurred about who was the bitch and who was the rightful heir to the throne as the flesh of his ribs. Not that the position was vacant, we have both occupied it at so many stages of our lives that we could probably not do without the other.

Whilst I held a carefree indifference about her or her apparently tragic situation, (I say apparently for what I knew I had gleamed whilst he was cushioned on my bosom), she loathed me with a passion that is best reserved for those intimate of lovers, or with so much venom that were it from a snake it would be none other than the black mamba or the Fierce Snake (Oxyuranus microlepidotus) which has 100 times more venom than any snake known to men.

My crime is not that I stole what belonged to her, for what I stole she had already taken from me before I snatched it from her after she grabbed it from me..... (Let me stop coz it’s making me all dizzy), my crime was I had lied about her which apparently to her was tantamount to rigging the vote or foul play, or whatever. Personally I think she was just grasping at straws trying to find a reason to hate me and hate what I represented, I think deep down she feared that had she given her heart the chance to get to know me, she might have grown to love me, and that could not happen. At the very least it would open up a can of worms, that commonsense would dictate was best left unopened. In the great scheme of things, the dimensions of our three way relationship are so complex that they are best left undefined.

Okay back to the no longer headless body, strange that curiosity did not kill this cat, instead it gave it another lease of life, it what sense I could not best describe but I felt complete as if another piece of the jigsaw was firmly in place and I could delegate that piece of my brain that had been so pre occupied with wanting to put a face to the persona on to other perhaps more productive business than that which it had engaged in. Conflicting emotions, as I gazed at her image, almost passing for a body double of my very own and yet we were very different in a way that complimented each other, otherwise we would not have managed to co-exist and rotate on the same axis Mother Nature would not have allowed.

Somehow by having a face she has humanised the whole plot, added another complex moral dilemma to this intricate web of confusion, anyone who has listened to a show on the radio and then later had the opportunity to watch it on TV would know what I am on about. Although I deleted the images for my hard drive capacity will not allow me to do otherwise, I’m sure her image will remain emblazoned in the secret cove of my brain that I dare not open unless held at gunpoint. Somehow I wonder if having now been alerted to the fact that there is indeed a face to the body, will that change the dynamics of our relationship.

Do we want to change the complex web of confusion? or as I suspect we have become interdependent, metamorphosed into one being, one soul....maybe we ought to accept the uncomfortable truth that just like the true meaning of light would be lost were it not for the presence of darkness, we can not all exist without one another.....but looking at the images again confirms what I already fear.......that we already have.........

Just like you, I’m probably struggling to make sense of this post, this muse, this complex web of confusion. Somehow it feels right to flow with the confusion, for some intricate tales are best illustrated in abstract form.