All the while,
and I bet you didn’t know. He has been after me. You know, I seen him peeking
from between the saplings and he was but a whiff of blackness and a smudge of
the impossible. I saw him, decades ago and I still see him now. He never left
me alone and I don’t know if he ever will. I find his magic to be toxic, a
growing parasite that will not rest until I join him. If you tell me that he is
the devil, then you may be right. To be honest, I have no clue what he is. To
get away from him, I think of you.
You hold me
still, still holding me here despite the hell that roars in my ears and death
which constantly tried to take me down. I want you to feel things that your
mind cannot comprehend on its own. To feel the mechanics of what I have found,
you cannot think as logical thinkers do. For it is not within the jellied brain
that you shall find the answers. It is somewhere in that knot in your throat
and the stir in your loans. That is where it is and that is where you shall
find me, cowering and afraid of the light.
All this time, he
is coming for me. When I cannot hear, when I cannot see, I reach out and grasp
with desperation, a grip on reality. I fall back into this morning, a place
that I thought I would never go again. I tried so hard to drive it back. I
tried so hard to muffle the screams of the manic thing within. I tried but
nothing could hold down that part that wanted more.
I drove and I
watching it jumping between the trees, just as before when a teenage version of
me saw the thing in the forest. I remember the strange man which danced and
flew, flitting between the winter trees. He would laugh and cavort around,
playing games with my eyes. I saw him this morning and then when I looked at
the stop sign, it was no longer red, but a sickly yellow hue. Then everything
left me. I could not find you there anymore, I found myself staring into a
blackness and void of anything else. I saw the bumper approach me and then the
impact. It was like an amusement ride gone horribly wrong and satanic, around and
around and more yellow. When everything stopped, my chest was exploding inside
with pain. Laughter erupted from my mouth and then my ears suddenly could hear
again. She screamed from somewhere close.
“Get out! Please,
Get out!”
I looked at my
chest and the yellow bag thing. I took a breath and the pain said hello. She
screamed…
“Get out! Get out
of the car!”
I opened the door
and stepped from the car, reaching back inside to get my purse. I was distant,
yet I stood. I looked back at myself, disheveled hair, pajama pants and pink
steel toed boots. Then back again, inside the body and then back again looking
down at the wounded girl.
I walked into the
center of the road and looked around. The world was beautiful, even with the
screaming lady. Flames, bursting flames…but that was from before. Memory
crashed around me but nothing seemed to stick. I felt him near to me, the bad
thing and so I stared into the air, very near him.
Then she left and
I found the pain again. I shall never be whole because there is too many of me.
I will never find reality because he stole that too.
And death
waits….grows angry and plots another way.
Don’t you know…my
mind is a war zone. So many fighting to find the way, to stop the pain and to
be victorious. You hold me still.
I run so fast and
climb so far and yet, she dances like a lunatic. You hold me still.
I beg him please,
don’t take me yet and then beg God for so much mercy.
And when I think
of you, I cannot stop….its like a bitter and glorious thing that fills my heart
with love and why…
You hold me
still, you put it together ….I am one.
He still comes.
When no one is looking and they are all pre-occupied with the world’s
amusements, he comes. I stand in the bathroom, still wrapped in my towel from
the shower. Here, I can feel him coming for me. The air grows thick and it is
as if doom were a ringing bell that I cannot hear. My ear is inward and I am
alerted of his passage.
I push into the
corner and I fill my mind with you. The one who understands and the one who
keeps me still.
I cannot see the
worms this time. I have another moment of peace. I cherish these fleeting
moments, these hours and these days, without the impact and the impending
warning of my death to come.
