Acolyte
Have I become myself again yet? How can I tell when I’ve finally returned from the truancy of the past year? I feel familiar senses returning piece by piece to the fold I knew. The unfinished portrait wreathed in dim, red light. I see myself as if distorted by the silt thickened currents of a black lagoon; a creature instilling such a comfortable disquiet.
I see myself swept like ashen charcoal into my bed sheets. My white chest a frail, phosphorescent cage, rising and falling with respiration in the deep red surrounding me. There is something inexplicably maternal about the fear emanating from my insides. My provider wards away the less frightening. Her readied blades are the arms that cradle my juvenility. She is the fabrication of my unspeakable fears; the one who will always be worse and more terrible than what can’t be imagined can imagine.
This is the feeling. The familial cold that sustains the dark parts in me and is dreaded by the cumbersome shadows of those on the outside who look down on me. This still, icy air adorns my skin with such thrilling tactility. To touch is to know.
The sinews of carnal mischief swell behind my eyes and provoke the animalistic hunger that once animated me. I’ve felt it creeping back in the past weeks. A trickling black ink welling in the unfathomable shadows of my wry smiles and whispering glances.
It is the hunter in me that gently toys with the fabric of my muscles and fills my frame with purposeful motions. It’s the predator that takes my hand and leads me through this garden, moonlit and solitary. I twist the petals between my fingers and feel wet grass under my bare feet; reflecting. Collecting.
Yes. It’s me.
Some garner purpose from belief. Well I have no religion.
But sometimes, I believe in magic.