House of the rising Sun

Follow me all the way down

Jun 23, 2025

My husband treats me like the rising sun.

“It’s not fair!” he cries as I bat my lashless eyelids.

They may be bald but he sees them fringed in lace. He sees whatever I want him to see because before I have bewitched anyone else, I have bewitched him.

I spent years looking for just the right mark. And as soon as I saw him, I knew. I remember him leaning back against the counter of our workplace—the Computer department of our local Best Buy—and I knew that I would possess him like a demon plague. But I didn’t make a move. I didn’t say a word. I set my sights and waited for the inevitable.

I’ve always liked a challenge. But I never would’ve guessed what a challenge my husband could be because I held all the keys to unlock him in a way that no one had before. My husband, possessed of a Capricorn and Aquarius Stellium, is particularly hard to bewitch. It takes a particular presence, a preternatural hum, to fill his ears with noise.

Of course, he approached me. A once confident man reduced to rubble by my presence. He was awkward in his pursuit, but I loved it. I welcomed his fumbling attempts to court me and I knew what effect I was having even as I pretended to be unaware.

I remember another Aquarius man I had dated in my youth. He was dangerous. And a fair bit unhinged. When he broke things off with me, I knew it was because he was threatened. He was so threatened by my casual, unattached demeanor that he spent at least an hour trying to reduce me with his reasoning. He spit out an array of reasons for his dismissal and I watched them float by nonplussed. Eventually, he accepted that he wouldn’t get a rise out of me and moved on. I thought back to every argument where he tried in vain to make me feel inferior—only succeeding in diminishing himself.

I’ve always had this effect on men—women, too. I have a Gemini Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Black Moon Lilith squaring my Virgo Mars. If there ever was such a thing, I have a dangerous mind. I knew my mind was dangerous from a young age because I watched how it cut the adults around me down to size.

I watched them flounder as I effortlessly exposed their every weakness.
I watched them crumble into dust.

My husband has never been threatened by this quality, because he lacks the ego to attach to such ideas of intellectual superiority. No, my husband knows who he is, what he’s good at, what he’s about. He knows he’s smart, but he doesn’t need to be perceived as such. And no matter how expertly I hone in on his weaknesses, he rises stone-strong from the knife wound.

And don’t get me wrong, I would never abuse this power. After all these years of being dogged by inferior but determined men, how could I? Our relationship works because I don’t want to cut corners just to win. I want to be the whetstone to his blade, the roughness that sharpens him—rather than dull him into impotency. And he does the same for me.

We argue lackadaisically. Lazily. But with that knife-sharp edge always glinting in the light of dawning consciousness. Neither of us are invested enough to defend our points. We are the body of the knife, not its tip. Slicing away to find what finally bites back.

Such bloodless argument would feel foreign to anyone but us. For us, it is sport and sundry. Turning up curiosities and, rarely, raw gold.

My husband lays down his weapons before me and frames his chest in outstretched arms.

“Lay waste to me,” he says. “Cut me where I can’t recover.”

But I would never strike the killing blow. Because I like to play with my food too much. Because as much as I am a selfish lover, always teasing and tempting him, always nudging my elbow into his most sensitive spaces, I am also the cat who keeps her prey alive. I love him back to life every day and I snuff him out at each sunset.

I cover him like the sun that is eaten by the waves—like the golden orb that casts itself down into the dark, watery abyss each evening before rising again untainted.

We eat each other, we feast on our flesh exchange.

And still, at the beginning of every day, I rise like the Sun he has cornered. Like a glowing orb he has lassoed and drug across an empty sky. I rise and I rise only for him. I blind those that cannot see me but his retinas remain immune.

I see myself reflected in those eyes and I am glorious to behold, like a lovelorn incubus—a beast made holy.

I suppose this is love. To eat each other whole each day and sleep among the bones. To look each other’s demons in the eye and say, “claim me. Claim the world if you must. I lay myself down at your feet.”

And each night I lay like a shadow of myself, lost to all that have known me.

All except one.