These damned chains

It’s been years since these chains began to twist around me like some kind of infernal snake.

Days seemed to all sing the same blasted melody — the one that made me wander through my life like a corpse looking for something to fill its empty rotten insides.

With closed eyes and a dissolved soul, everything and nothing made sense. Dichotomy? An illusion that only blessed my existence when I didn't need it.

The colors reality wore, were too often the same as the abstract shades that inhabited my dreams. She was, always, a capricious being with me. She enchanted me many times with her inconsistent love, changing dresses and tuxedos every now and then to constantly keep me on edge looking for her. She appeared in my life like a typhoon that destroys all that’s been built and leaves you naked before its consequences. Consequences that, indeed, you never asked for but from whom your are the sole responsible. Who told me to trust her or need her to exist?

She wrapped me in promises of meaning in forms of art that only i could see and kisses that tasted like a forever but only stayed until i needed to breath again.

The passion I felt for her shapes made me love a secluded life as much as debauchery — a life of fleeing either way.

Gods and emptiness blended and melted before me each time her lips left mine to the cold exposure of the abyss.

Her warmth always came hand in hand with the chaos of my past — distant echoes and the tender embraces of those who once gave me breath. Though her persona, was often the engine of my breathing and passion, she also made me wish to strangle her until she wouldnt be able to laugh and rip the meaning from her chest. Meaning that had always been mine to begin with.

She always left. She always abandoned me in my ashes, after turning into the void and staring into my eyes until I screamed in pure horror. She tore away my garments with such care — so many that I tried to sew together again, hoping she would love me — but she would always burn them, and then laugh in my face with disdain, like a damn maniac. The exact same one that lived in my veins when I designed clothes for her.

Tears burned my eyes as I hid from the nothingness — that deformed hellhound that endlessly followed her, craving to devour me. I knew it was her lover and consort. But comparatively to its lover, the hellhound had a maniac love for me. He followed me everywhere. Anywhere.

It’s been years since I’ve slept with these chains, you know?

I got used to seeing her dissolve before me — reality. Her face stopped being perfect after some years. She always showed one or another deformed part. An eye that looked at the graveyard of ideas while the other melted from her skull. Her face that during a second could look like my long lost dream and the other like the most grotesque demon that had ever lived in my head. Her lips no longer sighed nor chuckled; they smelled of death and rotten desires.

But, each time she visited, her broken, cracked body revealed bloody threads that tied her to my chains.

I wasn’t surprised to learn she was just a puppet in my hands. Nor was I disturbed by the times I strangled her with them. Strange, isn’t it?

I never wondered where the chains came from, nor who held the key.

To be honest, it never crossed my mind to check. It was easier to assume they were forces outside myself — something grand, maybe divine, or an illness, an horror too disturbing to be named or some colossal lie told by a God i didn'tknow existed. I even built altars to think aloud about it. If it came to that, the fault wouldn’t be mine. No one likes that.

If the puppet failed to work, the blame belonged to that mystery. Not me. Never me.

A fine meaning for life, if you ask me — searching for that hidden knowing unknown.

The problem was acknowledging years later, that it was I who wore those chains like clothed.

What incoherence of mine! Not noticing that I had cradled myself in my own misery. Made myself comfortable in a hell constructed only by myself.

I loved myself to the point of obsession — fascinated by watching my despair feel protected. A safety granted by a world that didn’t feed my hunger, but created the beast that now lives within me, feeding on your attention.

It’s truly apotheotic to see someone captive to chains that seem to come from nowhere — except from their own mind.

There’s nothing special here. I’m just someone who enjoys your gaze, even if your eyes make me fear your whispers when I’m gone.

Your attention — when you speak only of my chains — is what lifts me, and for a few brief moments, existence gains meaning. When im noticed. When your pity brings the allegedly necessary compassion that wasnt there when I screamed for attention. Im visible, even if it's only because of my misery and demons.

A few days ago, I finally let go of those chains.

I feel naked and shapeless.

Look at me world.

Look at my filthy ego

Look at my egoitic self.

Look at my luciferian anger.

Look.

You will see me in my greatest monstrosity — in my darkest part — the demon I myself forced between my ribs and imprisoned with my own guts, muffling it with my heart until it chocked.

Those whispers I never told you, but always thought. Those thoughts that stole my sleep, simply because I never considered they deserved to be considered by others.

And when you still stay, even after this, I’ll throw away the damned key to these chains.

Because i could have breath without saying sorry for it. Because i could have screamed without feeling like the epicentre of the world's misery.

Because i could have fucking lived sooner.

Because I could always have been free from myself, and from the meaning that existed only for that reflection of me that sought your attention, not your affection.