Having exorcised demons, I am coming back to my life with a vengeance.
Lost in a hall of mirrors, before long I thought the reflection in the mirror was actually me. But my doppelganger liked the things I did not, embraced places I dared not go. I suppose there was some form of liberation there, to sneak in amongst the others, to try to go that way. Yet slowly, almost inperceptibly, I was draining away. I knew it in my dreams, where I would scream out, "I'm a prisoner!" or literally try to walk away in my sleep. My inner self knew what my outer self stubbornly denied. And so I walked that path for a while, long enough to start feeling it as a relentless beat, a pain which wracked me so hard, my body rebelling against the lie, I could no longer move with fluidity. Is this how the rest live? I wondered, and yet I knew the tragic truth.
Live life directly, don't take someone else's word for it - this has been the closest thing to a mantra for me. The mind whined and whimpered in the corner like a little lost dog. A blindness of the senses prevailed, somehow soothing in its suffocation. How could this amnesia overtake me? Falling without reason, too afraid to reach out and find one. I had never been this way before. In my three and a half decades of life, it had been mostly glory, shame banished to the recesses. Yet the dark coil of wanting, yes like a moth to a flame, kept me circling this thing until it was done. I have lived through it. No - not without a scratch - but still, no regrets. For there was beauty, even in the road to destruction.
