ShadowStepping

by jonathon david hawkins

This piece of writing is a stream of consciousness "poem" that i began writing during my senior year of high school and finished sometime during my freshman year of college. It's a hard read at first, but it gets easier once your eyes get used to the rhythm.

sometimes you don't know what to do and you don't know what to say and you don't know what to do about it because it hurts too much to get close to people because people always end up hurting people and you don't know why they do it but they do and it hurts you because all you want is someone to hold and someone to make you whole but instead you build walls and barricades and trenches and moats to keep all the cruel people out and all the kind people in but then you find out that there are no kind people there are only cruel bastards and you're all alone behind your defenses and if you try to get out you get caught in the barbed wire and you're left to dry in the sun until you find out that there are some kind people but whenever one tries to help you down from the bleeding wire some bastard comes along to screw it up for you and there are times when you stand there feeling so cold and alone and you want to cry because you're so sick and tired of being so ugly and alone and being an outlander who doesn't belong to anyone or anything and you've done everything you can to make yourself belong but all you've succeeded in doing is turning yourself into a clown for all the beautiful people and as you stand there crying as you think about the beautiful people and all of the ugly things that they do and the night wind freezes your tears and sears your face and your hands get numb and swollen and the wind cuts through your clothes and you start to shiver and shake and begin to walk home but then you look up at the moon and a smile splits your burned face because you realize that here in the dark is where you belong because even though you're afraid of the dark this is the only place where they can't see how sad and ugly you are and the beautiful people who are ugly on the inside don't belong here in the outland only you and the freaks and the dogs and the clowns and the monsters and the kings of pain and all the other followers of the crow belong here and you all stand in the dark midnight sons and shadow men looking up at the face of the moon listening to its beautiful twilight symphony which guides you mile by mile to midian even as it goes unheard by the deaf ears of the beautiful people and as you slip like liquid shadows across the umbral landscape of our own warped minds you are kept warm by the cold carrion comforts that only you and the other ugly people like you can find in the shadows of this outland where monsters live and giants still walk the face of the earth and the moon tells you that there is some justice in this cat driven universe with all of the people both ugly and beautiful as clockwork mice in a maze where the walls are lined with razors and the cheese is laced with cyanide and you grow up living in two worlds the real one where all of their rules and all of their definitions hold sway and your world where your words have the power and it's shaped by myths and legends and stories of great men who are long dead and your world is so much more beautiful and so much more just and you escape to your world as often as you can but the more time you spend in that world the shittier things get in this world and you find that you no longer belong here anymore you're an alien from the outland and when you try to make things work in this world you find out it's too little too late too harsh to cope with so you try to bring pieces of your world into this world in order to make it more bearable and to weave a safety net to catch you when the beautiful people push you down but you're too clumsy to be a hero too weak to be a guardian and too doubtful to be a savior and no one believes the old tales anymore except you anyway and you realize that the world has changed too much for such old ideals and beliefs to hold the power to change things in any significant way and the world has gone full circle and the forces of entropy have dragged modern man through a regression that has lowered it to its most primitive level and that is why we shoot each other on the freeways and shank each other for our shoes and rape and rob and murder and molest and burn and destroy the innocent and the world has grown too dark for a bright knight to cleanse it and no paladin can hope to purify it and today's and tomorrow's heroes must be warlords who sink from the murk of the outland not rise from the bright walls of camelot and the glimmering chain mail must be replaced by bands of barbed wire and the shining armor must be replaced by thick layers of concrete under which your emotions must be hid and the bright shield must be set aside in favor of a mass of lies and misdirection and the sharp and swinging sword must be replaced by hooked and razored blades and words must be your spears and fury your lance and subversion and duplicity the arrows that drag your enemies down and the black of crow's wings must replace the flash of hunting falcon's talons and you must be hard as adamantine and cold as a beautiful person's heart and as elusive as a dream of peace and happiness and knowledge must replace righteousness if you are to succeed because the world is a dragon that eats the innocent and rends the righteous beneath its claws and if you allow yourself to feel they will drag you down and drown you in the muck of the promises that spew forth from their lips in order to keep you quiet and a dead hero is of no use to a child because it cannot protect him from the words of the dragon so you must be diehard and cold and place yourself like a wall between this world and the children if you are to protect them and keep them safe and you realize that you are too weak to kill the dragon but if you are cruel and wicked enough you can ride it and turn it back upon its own forces and show no mercy unto the enemy for they are wicked and would show none in your place and you must let them rely on the mercy of god if he exists to protect those who should be spared and punish the punishers and why would a god allow children to whither and die with their bellies empty and their hearts torn and the viruses of their parent's sin coursing through their blood as the beautiful people eat their fill and turn your world inside out and grind the innocent beneath the machinery of their words and in times of despair you scream to the heavens for an answer to why the unrighteous rule and all you get in this world is the burning unfeeling rays of the sun that blackens your skin and steals your eyes so instead you turn the other world the world of midian and the outland where the moon looks down on you with her beautiful scarred face and you are free to be who you are not what the world demands that you be and you curl into sleep on the cold asphalt and listen to the song of the moon and count the winds of the crows one is for bad news two is for mirth three is a wedding four is a birth five is for riches six is a thief seven is a journey eight is for grief nine is a secret ten is for sorrow eleven is for love twelve is joy tomorrow but tomorrow never comes here in the outland but you get by without it because you must and that is the way of the worlds and you answer the calls of the wild ones who rule midian and don the armor of the king of pain and call on it to protect you from the beautiful people and a small child climbs over the rocky ridge looking forward into the desert sand looking always for the danger as he flees the bombing of his village as a black girl sinks down onto a rock on the outskirts of her dying village crying bloody tears her heart torn and soul broken in despair for what her life has become as she watches the children die and a girl gently lays her hand upon the face of her dead brother a soldier a hero a victim in a war of senselessness and politics and a mouse dashes to earth tearing to get free of the clutching talons of a hunting owl and in the midst of life we are in death and you know that this is the only thing that links every living being on this planet we all have our own languages our own desires our own prejudices and our own dreams and our own sins but we all one day will die whether at the impact of a bullet or the claws of starvation or the jaws of a predator or strapped in a mechanation of wire and plastic that forces the recycled air of a sterile hospital room into tired old lungs death will come eventually to all things and you think that it might not be bad that all things to meet their end and they say the earth is dying and we must save it but you think that perhaps we should simply let it be and perhaps the earth's time has come and it has done its duty and served us well and deserves the rest that all eventually find in death and the people who want to save the earth remind you of the people who try to help monsters and they are good people but they perhaps are misguided and don't understand that what they try to do is impossible for we are all made as we are and we cannot be what we aren't and it is foolishness to try and they try to drag you and the other monsters from the dark side of the moon into the light of the noon-time sun for your own good but midnight sons shrivel in the sun and shadow men fade in the bright of the day and no matter how hard they try they can never truly belong in the waking world because yours are hearts of darkness and the creatures of the outland belong in dreams and cannot belong in the real world without sacrificing the part of themselves that makes them true and as you skulk along the corridors of their world you can sometimes see the glimmer of a lunatic in someone's eye and you know that beneath the pretty clothes and the perfect hair and the tan skin awaits a dragon trying to break loose from the chains that bind it because that person is an outlander like you but they won't admit it and you can picture them lying in be at night tossing in the pools of their sweat and you know they hear the bay of the wolves and long to run with them but they force or are forced to submit to the rules laid out for them instead of the law and order inherent in monstrosities and they live by eat your peas and drink your milk and do your homework and say your prayers and don't say that in public and work hard and be nice to all the other boys and girls and tow the line and follow the rules and everything will be okay but those are rules to die by because they chain your soul and imprison your spirit because they are the rules and laws of the beautiful people and for a dog to live by the rules of the beautiful people is like a hawk trying to live the life of a shark you are out of your element and fighting in an alien world with cold blooded beasts with hearts of coal and souls of ice instead you must rise above their rules and forge ahead on your own path as tangled and crooked as it may be and you know that you must follow the wings of the crows because they know the way home to midian where you and all the others like you belong on the dark side of the moon because she has found the beauty in her scars and you know that if you are ever to do the same you must distance yourself from the beautiful people and the wind beats down on you and your pack as you trudge ever homeward through the harsh bright white of the blizzard and fear drives your weighted and weary legs onward because you all can hear the approach of the baying hounds mingling with the shriek of the banshee razor wind and through the blurred vision of dry wind burned eyes you think that you can see the movement of white on white through the wall of driving snow before you and your eyes throb with the effort of seeing but eventually you do see and what you see stops your pack in its tracks and fills it with dread joy because what you see is the figure of a genderless man walking toward you and his sharp skin is white and hard as porcelain and his muscles are like chiseled ice and his cobalt eyes peer out from a shower of wind whipped silk hair spun of the sound of a black cat's paws on concrete and he walks through the snow unclothed unhindered unharmed and you know that he does not ignore the storm instead he is part of it an avatar of remoteness which he absorbs and emanates and he turns to you and those cobalt eyes look to you in you through you past you and he opens his mouth to speak to you and his opened mouth is a black gash opened on the surface of his white face framed by the sharp square stalactites of his teeth and the thin white banks of his lips and his silent voice is the scream of the driving cutting wind and he speaks but a single word of command and your and your pack obey because a blind man could see that this is an angel but though he is white he is not of the winged harp playing seraphim of the beautiful people but the cold hard avenging guardian angel of the midnight sons and all followers of the crows and your pack presses on harder faster than before as he fades into the white of the storm's wall behind you and the soon the baying of the hounds is cut short leaving a dirge's gap of silence in the wind's wail as your pack's midnight exodus continues and there are days when you can't stand the thought of being around anyone but you're trapped like a rat in a cage with no place to escape to and they want you to be the clown and to entertain them and being what you are you do your best to fulfill that desire and it makes you sick to do so and your head starts to throb and feel as though it is cracking and splintering like an ice cube dropped in a pot of boiling water and still the bleeding fools around you yammer and yammer and yammer and laugh at stupid jokes and pretend to be interested in the anecdotes of a boring old man and the band plays old songs poorly and too slow and you try to keep yourself from bolting for the door and running off into the night and you grip the edge of the seat with the effort of the restraint and the ache in your head and the frustration and the yammering make you angrier and angrier and the more you try to hide the anger the more you keep it inside like a bottled demon the worse the pain wracks your skull and you want to retreat to the bliss of a darkened bedroom with a lighted stereo blasting a cacophony of pounding drums screaming guitars and shouted lyrics written by angry men and let the noise and the rage fill the cracks in your splitting head and the waves of anger and animosity drift off into the darkness around you carrying the bottled demon with it as you fade into the bliss of your mental abyss but instead you stay there in the loud and smoke filled restaurant but it is the noise of inanity that surrounds you and it has no purpose no power no will no meaning other than an illustration of what you hate about people and how they care so much about things that don't mean anything and not at all about the things that do and when you finally escape the confines of the restaurant you're trapped in the car with the prattling of your family for what seems an eternity as you drive home and by the time you arrive there the very thought of even being in the same building with these people makes you want to vomit and as the car rolls to a stop you bolt and run and let yourself be taken in by the pounding of the blood in your veins as it pulses past throbbing temples and the scream of the stars and the shouted lyrics of the scarred moon and you let the shadows carry you numb you and take the ache from your skull as you run past the lighted houses fleeing from the same stupid meaningless conversations that are being held behind each glowing pane of glass until you let yourself collapse into the seat of a swing and you let the tips of your toes drag through the sand as your lungs clutch at the air like a dying man to his last hopes and let the screaming night's silence carry you away and give you a moment's kind peace and you sit there contemplating the fact that sooner or later you will have to return to your house which is not your home and wonder about the day when you won't return and sometimes words are your enemies because they drag at your tongue and twist themselves as they pass from your lips and hurt where they were meant to heal and you ache because you cannot express yourself and you try to write instead of speak and that allows you to control yourself in what you say but still the words will not come and you have to struggle and fight for each paragraph each sentence each line of text and the reason is that you are trying to express pure emotion in the language of man and it won't work because there are no words for what you feel because the language of emotions is spoken through the arch of eyebrows the flash of angry tear filled eyes the wails of pain and loss the scream of an electric guitar the impact of a fist's blow the strength and warmth of a friend's embrace on a day when life touches you with its coldness and the language of man cannot hope to express emotion in its own terms because it is civilized and specific and based on concretes and absolutes and is constrained by rules and grammar and nouns and verbs and pronouns and adverbs and emotion has no rules has no guidelines and has no books that tell you how you are supposed to feel and we are all born naked into this world unclothed and unwarned of what is to come and our first word is never mamma or daddy it is that first inarticulate wail that we let slip in that delivery room when we first realize where we are and what has become of us and what is to come and in second grade you were happy you laughed read played told jokes sang smiled and felt real and clean but that was a long time ago and you don't do any of those things for real anymore because when you were in the third grade you started to change while others didn't in body mind soul sight and they all laughed because now you were different and they kept laughing and laugh still to this day because you're still different never stopped being different even though you pretended to for awhile and they think you're clumsy because your feet are heavy and drag at the ground while they dance around you and your hands are slow and drop the ball when you play their stupid games but they are blind as bullets because they do not see you dancing a dance more subtle and sinister than they can conceive and they do not see that you play infinite games that are so far beyond their fucking little football fields that their cramped minds cannot fathom them you dance around their emotional outreaches and you play their emotions like a viola making them happy sad scared mad as your cancerous mind sees fit and you do so with such skill that they don't even realize that they are not feeling their own emotions only thrashing about to the tune of whatever emotion you choose to broadcast that moment like a bad song off the radio that bounces around inside your skull like a bat gone mad and you laugh at them even though there are some people who are immune or at least resistant to your control but even they can't see what you really are because your scars have made you strong given you strength and power and protection and the ability to hide and in their ignorance all the beautiful people cannot appreciate the irony of it all because they are the ones who gave you the scars they are the ones who cut you with their words their laughter their sidelong looks as you tried to walk invisible down the halls terrified that you would bleed to death before you could grow strong but you did grow strong because you accepted yourself for what you are and you wear your scars like fine armor and look out at the world from within your well with obsidian crow's eyes but sometimes you feel lost in the screaming mass of people that writhe through these halls and it's like swimming in tar because all you can see is black all you can smell is black all you can taste is black all you can hear is black and all of humanity is a pollution in your world clogging your pores choking your lungs burning your eyes and the tar is impossible to swim in so as you sink you hang suspended in the pollution gnashing your teeth in tar not knowing if you're rising or falling eating or being eaten in the black and sometimes you feel brilliant with fire burning behind your black eyes you know everything feel everything see everything are everything and there is nothing you don't know and no concept you cannot comprehend you know that anyone who rises to meet the challenge in your burning eyes will be left nothing but a charred husk left to float on the secret slipstreams of the outland as you shadowstep through the night sky but sometimes doubt seizes at your skull and you realize just how weak you are and the daemons in the back of your head take pleasure in showing you images of all of the times that you've failed and weakness's cost with hard black air beneath your feet giving way to insubstantiallity and your body falls through the night sky as the sun rises and burns your body as the stars speed past you in your descent unwilling to help you as luna flees the brightening stage as your body hits the tar with a sound like a gunshot as your bones crack against its concrete hardness and your eyes cold and fireless are knocked from your skull and your sun blackened flesh explodes into a cloud of charred dust as you sink once more into the quagmire hoping to rise once again some dark night and sometimes at night you sit on your throne in the dark with crows at your shoulders and outlanders at your elbows surrounded by all the ghouls goblins kings queens serfs knights samurai and monsters that populate the mythology of your mind and you know that they are not enough to make you whole and you crave someone to love who will love you in return someone who will see past your scars and will help chain your anger and help keep your daemons bottled but you're too ugly and the scars on your face hinder your tongue so you are unable to use your feeble words to persuade them to look beyond how ugly you are so the reality of your life hits you in the face like a hatchet and you know you are doomed to walk like a leper through your life finding company only in your own kind your own mind and death and sometimes life moves so slow with glacial speed but other times it moves so fast you're afraid you'll burn up and die with your eyeballs screaming and sometimes you have a dream were a dark man preaches from his pulpit atop a car inciting them all to riot and you begin to preach from atop your own altar of crushed cars and you and the other each try to out preach the other fighting for control of the crowd as you toss words like atom bombs the piles of crushed cars beneath the two of you grow and you scream until your out stretched palms bleed and the hordes of humanity that throng around you now belong to you body heart and soul and you unleash them upon the earth like a wave of rabid vermin and sometimes you despise being their jester and it fills you with an insane rage and urge to hurt them hurt yourself hurt everyone hurt everything hurt whatever but they are ignorant fools because they are too busy laughing to see your rage to see that you would love to slam your fist down their throats and rip their tongues out at the root smashing their teeth to shard in the process just so you can stop the fucking laughter but you don't because if it wasn't for the laughter you wouldn't have any company a all and sometimes you scream and scream and scream and scream and scream until the sound tears your throat and you can taste feel the coppery trail left by the blood as it trickles down to your gullet but still you wail like a banshee till he veins in your face burst and your ears bleed and your eyeballs implode into empty sockets and keep screaming into the dark in the vain hope that someone will he and you know what it is like to be a blind man with eyes scaled by rage relying on your hands to show you the world as it truly is as it truly could be you know what it is to come to depend on that pair of strong beautiful hands to give definition and bright meaning to the darkened confines of your life and you know what it is like to have those hands ripped from your wrists by a savage dog leaving you bereft for the loss of bright touch leaving you only eyes that see sadness desolation despair ears that hear only laughter wicked cruel and clear and a tongue that tastes only ashes and you wonder what happens to babies and children when they die do they get carried off to a better place than the hell hole they were born into or ar they allowed simply to rot and decay and you lay awake at night wondering about it and asking the ceiling but the only answer you get is a crack in the plaster and you know what its like to be a thin skinned porcelain mannequin powered by emptiness shuddering at the thought of letting anyone touch you out of pity because the kindness might crack your brittle shell allowing you to drain out of its shattered remains and you feel that it's better to be an empty husk than being pure emptiness and the two of you stand separated by a sheet of black glass and your face is shadowed by the light that flows from her side of the glass as the darkness on your side laps at your ankles like black sea water and you ask her why she's leaving you letting him steal her away and horde her and she calls you silly and says she's not leaving you and never will you'll be friends till long after the earth ends and nothing he can do will ever separate you and he can never come between you and her and your hands begin to bleed as you push against the black glass and ask her can't you see that he already has and she says stop it you're bleeding and you say so are you but she can't won't see or feel the cuts on her face and as you watch the glass wraps around her like a clear black bubble and you push harder at the slick surface trying to get to her and the glass cuts tears rips your hands into lumps of bleeding meat and then your wrists and then your forearms and then your elbows until all you're left with is bleeding stumps as the glass bubble floats away with her and her light inside you're left slumped in the shadows as the blood runs from your torn and bleeding no longer there limbs to drain away into the darkness swimming about you as the screen fades to black and the old man prattles on at you with his acidic stale bad coffee breath and he tries to stare you down and you return his gaze in spades wishing you could focus the derision you feel for the tired old dog into a spike of iron you could drive through the top of his aging skull pinning his wagging tongue down so you don't have to listen to his stupid fucking babbling anymore because his voice feels like snot in your ears and you have to fight the urge to crush your ears and grind them against your skull with the heels of your palms in trying to scrub them clean and rid your ears and head of all the shit that teachers parents adults spew forth from their mouths like raw sewage and you wish you could take every cruel word he's ever said every cruel act he's ever performed that caused her pain of head heart or body and turn it into pure kinetic energy and turn it back upon him and let the physical blows rain down on his ungrateful skull so he'd pay for the pain he's caused her and instead you sit on your hands and wince in pain because she won't let you do anything and it hurts you when he hurts her but all you can do is sit there and seethe at the air and feel as if the anger that you're trying to contain will make you explode like a claymore destroying all in your firing arc and you sit surrounded by people who want to be your friends but you doubt they even know what the word means at least as you define it the word means more than someone you talk to in the hall and get stoned with occasionally it's someone who helps make you whole and is willing to help have and hold you when you feel as if you'll die from the pain and crack you up side the head when you do something incredibly stupid and they don't care who you are or what you look like because they know what you are and they understand you and don't ask anything of you other than that you be their friend in return and that means you'd kill or die for them and more importantly keep living for them because sometimes that's harder and people unload all the pain in their lives onto you your friends do your friends' friends do your family does your family's friends do your friends' families do and complete strangers do and when their troubles grow too large for them to handle they pass the burden over onto your shoulders with the weight of their words and it drives you insane and angry but not because they are trying to make you help them bear their pain but instead because of the maddening frustration you feel at not being able to help them and you wish that you could take away all of their pain and trouble and bear it away yourself upon your own malformed shoulders because you know you are used to better suited to carrying pain than they are because it is inherent in what you are and what you've done all your life but like the poles of a magnet like pushes from like and pain pushes from pain even though misery loves company and so you are inadequate because you try to comfort them with words but your lips cannot give shape sound to the screaming in your heart and you try to comfort with your touch but you have stayed too long in the outland and your hands are clumsy and don't know how to comfort without crushing so you nail yourself to a cross of other people's pain and scream in defiance and you can't explain to people why you do the things you do that your head is so full of crap that you can't deal with it all because you think too damn much until all you can do is think and your body locks up like a wind up toy with rusted springs so you do everything you possibly can to keep from thinking you get close to someone knowing that they won't be there forever but at least they're there for now and you feel instead of think and you're allowed to be happy but then they stab you in the back hard and unsatisfied with that they return a year later to twist the broken blade and leave you crying in a pool of black blood and then you find a friend a friend for life a friend for death a friend for all time and this time when you feel what you feel is love pure and true love for a friend love for someone who you would do anything for someone who lifts you out of the blackness of your own blood but then someone comes to drag them away and you fall backwards slipping sliding failing flailing back into the blackness and you swear that if you won't be allowed to feel anything but pain then so fucking be it you'll feel it with a vengeance you feel pain on the football field you feel pain on the wrestling mat you feel pain in the sparring ring and if you cannot gain access to these you will pound the rough canvas surface of punching bag and strike until the blood and puss seeps from flayed knuckles and your foreknuckles grow smooth and purple with constantly healing scars anything to make you feel something pain anger rage love lost lust confusion bliss happiness sadness anything but the emptiness of thinking and you relied on her to bleed away the anger and drain the poison from your veins to keep you from exploding at the first spark of insolence that incites you to anger and just by being near her she spreads her calm but now she's gone and left you so now the only way left for you to vent is to retreat to the three drugs that got you through your life before she came along the three valves that let the scalding methane steam escape before it explodes the purposeless engine containing it the three things the only three things you have left the pain the writing the head games the pain is the first drug the on with which you are most intimate your tongue is a brick of clay so since you can't express the rage you feel in words you express it through the sport the combat the violence the battle the pain you inflict on others hoping they'll understand why you do it but they oh so rarely do and when there's no one left to inflict the pain upon you turn it back upon yourself you strap on the football helmet and slam through the opposing line holding an intimate conversation with deaf men you crush your way across the wrestling mat and your opponent refuses to realize you are pouring your heart out to him and in the sparring ring you small talk in panting silence you slam forward pushing a fist into his chest hello and he delivers a block that jumps your shoulder out of its socket hi how are you a kick to his ribs shitty my heart's bleeding sir a front kick that places his toes like a spear point in your solar plexus how so and as the kick drives the breath past your teeth like steam from a whistle you rush forward like a bull in a ring swing your fists four times with all your might connecting once she left me sir a ridge hand to your jaw life sucks kid get a straw one weak hit to his chest thanks for the advice a palm heel to your forehead that rocks back your skull bouncing it off of your spine sending the world into an explosion of black and white poison fireworks been great talking to ya kid and at night after you've talked to yourself on the punching bag for half an hour and the pain from your burned and bloody knuckles pushes against the endorphins in your blood like a straight razor against cotton you sit at a desk lit by a single white candle while the stereo screams obscenities in your ear and you try to let what you feel write itself down as the poison flows like ink from your pen because your voice is weak and bounces off of their concrete ears but when you trick them into reading your words they can slip like hypodermic needles into their eyes and inject a fraction of your poison burn the patterns of your anger into the back of their retinas make them see a fraction of what you see hear a fraction of what you hear feel a fraction of what you feel but there are times when the potency of the poison in your thought stream is too wicked for written words too subtle for physical pain so instead you select a victim from out of the herd single them out as prey and crouch like a cat in their cranium and dig your clawed paws into their gray matter and shape it like clay and play your head games until you've had your fill of manipulating the simple minds of cattle and no longer desire need to vent your poison until the next time you approach critical mass and every once in awhile you have to run away from home school work friends family everything that seeks to encase and calcify you in a concrete womb of false security where everybody knows your name face number have their formulated opinions of who what why you are based on your mother father brother sister and you just want to run away to a new place where no one knows your face and give yourself a new name and just start over from the beginning knowing what to do what not to do and how to be who what you want to be not who what they expect you to be because you can feel yourself conforming to their opinions with every action that you take and you fear losing yourself in the ocean of their expectations and the two of you sit so close to each other breathing the same air hearing the same words seeing the same lights flash across the screen in a tale of love hope sadness and joy and you are as close as the skin that brushes touches accidentally and your one wish is to speak how you feel because maybe this one is to be the end of your vigil of loneliness but you dare not speak for the wall of inhibitions and fears built up by years of isolation and loneliness spent in the dark waiting for someone who is unafraid of the shadows so instead you sit and let the silence continue because you are afraid of losing what you do have if you break the pain of beautiful silence as images of other people's false reality flashes across the screen as the truth bites deeper and people broadcast their emotions like radio waves that your shadow laden brain can't block out and so you feel what they feel as their radiated pain penetrates the marrow of your fossilized bones and so you are forced to face the question that is thrust upon your shoulders you must decide either to end their pain and sacrifice your right to remain free of the gestalt of of pain anger sadness despair and desolation that their seething emotions drag you into or you must isolate yourself from the desperation they breath and breed but in that isolation you would be forced to deal with the dragon that lurks festering in the darkness of your own skull and so that is the choice you have to make between crucifixion at the taloned hands of your internal demons or immolation on the altar of their clinging emotions and you peel their clutching hands from your struggling limbs and manage to leap into the abyss if only for a moment and allow your mind to drift in an uncold sea of empathic deprivation as your reeling mind calms and calculates tabulates the odds ends reasons rhymes of the emotional outreaches that lap at the black shores of your internal isolation chamber and you reach out past the veil and allow your fingers to trail through the currents of her mind and as your fingers come away wet you raise them to your lips to taste her character and allow your will to wrap itself around her emotions and roll the words of her will about your tongue until you know the taste of her soul and you can know the feel of the dusty winds that blow through the attic of her mind and your mind reels out through the void looking searching seeking in the emptiness for an end to the emptiness and you try on their minds like the skins of animals hoping to find a soul that fits but when you find one you're shocked at the source and are cast into doubt and your mind unlocks the lies truths and half truths of other peoples lives loves and worries as with the twist of a silver key but as the jigsawed puzzle pieces of your own brain fall about your own feet you are helpless to interpret and put yourself back together or read the portents hidden in the patterns of their falling and you stand there just staring at the fallen yarrow sticks of your soul as you realize that for you it is impossible for the doctor to heal himself and you must instead simply clutch at the wound and pray for the bleeding to stop and you wish you could find solace in the sanctity of combat with the flash of steel and the gnash of teeth and the stench of sulphur because then you could take action to end your confusion but instead you find yourself staring dumbly down the length of your life wondering why and the people who bother to look mistake your empathy for true kindness and they call you nice and call you good and call you kind and call you caring and cannot see your are the worst type of poisonous infection that spreads among the population of humanity's swarming horde and you scream in the agony of frustration as you lose your grip on the abyss and fall back into the harsh light of reality