You shy away like a bug from a hot flame that may burn you, boil your innards and make the filth inside you pour out, be revealed, be shunned disgustedly. You skitter from shadow to shelf, back to shadows that you know will disguise you. You live, dodging the light, movement, discovery. You would not be this afraid, no, you are a strong one. You would not be this afraid if you knew they would not tear your wings away from your deceptively soft shell, and let you live in the agony of knowing – there was a time you were not afraid.
You lie. It was always this way. You have just come to realise and re-realise what life holds for you. Like a re-birth..only not. There is no way, you have come to conclude, that you may re-learn the past so it does not bind you. You are bound, you recall, by invisible threads to invisible thoughts that tower over you, threateningly. There was a time you were not afraid of your own mind.
They speak to you with their silence – not their ferocious attacks, but through their silent invasion of everything you first thought yours. They are under your skin, crawling, itching, uncomfortably close, uncomfortably you, uncomfortably no longer yours to command. And here you lie in a body that betrays you. Marked, branded with words they taught you. Your body betrays you.
You lie. Alone. Knowing where they were, where they went, where they touched, where they crawled beneath your skin and left their filth to be yours. And you know.
There is nothing left to be done now.
You know too much.
