THE TRAPS WE BUILD

The song that kept echoing in my head while reading Mantide, the literary debut of Cecilia Rita published by NN Editore, was David by Lorde.

“I made you God ‘cause it was all that I knew how to do”

Mia made Ruben her God.

They met in high school — he had something of an animal caught in a trap, cornered and ready to strike, the kind you convince yourself only you can help. Mia made him a God because he told her to, and she let him say it: what else can you do in front of someone too fragile to save themselves?

You have to free him, clean the wounds, show him the beauty of the world, teach him that there’s no need to bite.

But what if, as we approach the trap, we realize it was all a cruel joke? What if the roles suddenly reversed — and we were the ones caught in the steel jaws, while the person we tried to save laughed as we bled out?

Ruben (as often happens with the “villains” of a story, the one who fascinates me the most) is known only through Mia’s words: he’s dead. He killed himself and blamed her, the one who left him. Now he haunts her like a ghost, his memory ambushing her every time she tries to move on — Ruben who ruins happy moments, Ruben who wants her as miserable as he is, Ruben who no longer wants her, Ruben whose hatred fuels everything, Ruben who frightens even his friends, Ruben clutching glass shards until he bleeds, Ruben dead in the bathtub — and that relentless question hammering her mind:

“At what point could I have changed it, to stop it?”

Mantide is soaked in guilt, pain, and loss — but curiously lacks the love that should justify such intensity.

Given the premise, I expected at least a trace of love — compromised, distorted, but present. Yet in Mia’s recollections, real affection barely flickers.

Tenderness, in Mantide, feels procedural: it doesn’t bleed into the rest like hate, despair, or trauma do. From Ruben, Mia learned everything — self-destruction, apathy, resentment. But not love.

“He had already decided he would love me,” she says about their first meeting.

In Mantide, love is pre-determined, staged — a performance that collapses once the curtain falls.

And that’s what makes it powerful: Rita allows Mia to see herself, too, as the one who held Ruben captive. She spent so long trapping him and forcing herself into his “do this,” “say that,” “think like me,” “be like me” — even after his death — that when the moment of self-awareness finally arrives, it feels like a rebellion.

A rebellion disguised as release.

A quiet permission to look at her scars, accept them, and finally begin again.

“I made you God ‘cause it was all that I knew how to do, but I don’t belong to anyone.”

Because sometimes salvation isn’t love — it’s the courage to walk away from the trap you’ve built together.