Who do you think you are?
Why did I do it? Am I depressed? Am I among those who hurt — those who live with darkness behind their eyes? Perhaps it was this stigma that comes from watching one side of a door for too long, wishing someone to press it open and remind me what’s on the other side?
No. All have felt their heart’s anxious cries. There is darkness and moaning everywhere, and I am no different. I am free to go where and with whom I please.
In another time, there was a hole, dug in childish naivety. This hole was soon infected, systemic and malignant, decaying and disfiguring all around it, stretching bold and unseen hands, capturing and corrupting behind numb eyes, wilting into wasteland like a slow poison. Within this hole there lived a beast, wild and unyielding, armed with words of death spoken in a soothing tone. Once upon a time, after there was not left but sand and stone and a truth unfeasable, after being ravaged and beaten and torn and spat upon in ignorance by this charmer, I sealed this beast within his hole, severing, debriding, and mending his viral abscess. I shut it in so deep its claws could not climb the walls and its jaws could not pry the hinges. It then starved and withered in its own filth, as it had strangled so much else. The fog behind my eyes was lifted, the pandemic contained.
Ages passed. This condemned land was scarred over, forever a reminder of great evil and great good.
But it’s become dark lately. The sun seems to be setting, the fog rolling in from the shores. Tripping over my own two legs, fumbling in the dark, I’ve allowed a stranger into this land and brought them deep into the wastes. I showed them the scars, the vast expanses that were once lush and full of life, the hole and the emaciated beast which slumbered within it. We trudged through the trenches and cut through the thorns, breathing the foul odors, remnants from a darker time.
Then, as we made our way out, this stranger told me a tale of The Other. One like me, who lived in her own time, her own land, her own life, with her own beast to kill.
In dividing my attention, I think I may have been nicked by a thorn on the way out that night. That poison felt so sweet, so familiar, brushing past each synapse in my head, tainting the blood within my veins. I needed to let it out somehow. The Other never kept any of it for herself, but me, I always had in the past. Hearing the stranger’s tale, how could I? How dare I?
I couldn’t. It’s not like me to be so selfish. Not anymore.
