Lost, without a map…
Walking down these familiar corridors, I pause and wonder how I got to where I am. I pause and wonder why I continue to press on… To fight a foe unseen, the creature calling my name from the darkness? The voice I believed had been slain? I’ve awoken here with no memory of my journey. Perhaps my presence in these halls is destiny.
Yet as I peruse these galleries, smattered with bloodstained murals painted once upon a time in hatred and bitterness, an old friend seems to stalk up behind me, greeting me with cold fingers, familiar fingers, fingers with the power comfort and destroy. Logic bids me to turn and run and never return, to erase this memory forever. But as sight has shown me, logic is another friend which cannot be trusted. This gallery, these corridors, should already be no more.
So I slow and greet this old stalking friend. He smiles to me, and we continue to peruse down darker hallways even as he pushes these old, rusted daggers deep into my chest. “Remember despair?” He asks of me. “Funny you should ask,” as I begin my tale.
What is it, descending down these torch-lit stairwells that I find so irresistable? What’s been calling me lately? Perhaps it’s been those poison hallucinations? Could it have been these deceitful apparitions which had fooled me into believing such a fortress could be toppled forever, brushing me with their numbing tendrils, now tugging at this armor which had once served me so well?
Or perhaps its all a daydream? Perhaps I’ve rebuilt this stronghold with my own hands, in some sort of sick monument to those who once had to slay their own dragon and banish it into their own abyss?
The world is cold and this fire I’ve built down here in these old ruins has begun to dim. I fear the night and what it brings. Did the stranger and The Other push me down here accidentally? Or had I been searching for the entrance this whole time?
I truly haven’t forgotten. I can never forget. A part of me wishes to, but another knows better. It knows that were it possible, it would have been done by now.
Woe is me, for I am undone. And lost without a map, to boot.
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.
