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There is a dream that is mine and mine alone. In it I am twelve years old once again, standing over your shell in the backyard of our childhood home as I try my level best to find a way to kill you where you will actually stay dead. Finding myself engaged once more in this futile task I recognize that I am dreaming and I open up your ribcage to find the part of you that makes you real, that makes all this yours, that would have been mine if only our parents had decided to head back to mom's place instead of dad's on the night of my conception. In reality, if there even is such a thing then it is wholly intangible to a lowly false creature such as myself, but in the dream it shines round and bright inside of you like the moon or a dragon's pearl. I take it from your chest bring it to my mouth and swallow it whole. Make it A warm, tingling feeling spreads throughout my body and suddenly even the shadows that I live among are brighter and more beautiful than anything that I've ever seen before. It's like when I take your blood but the blossoming of my senses is no longer bound by the inadequacy of my feeble human mind and rotting human body. I look at you and I can see your entire self even the parts that you usually keep hidden. It's not much to look at now that I've relived you of that which you'd come to consider such a burden, but you have been the center of my world for so long that there's still nobody else I'd rather know so deeply. I yearn to dissolve the boundary between us slowly, to better savor your last moments as an existence separate from my own, but I restrain myself. Then I hollow you out before you can comprehend my betrayal. This is perhaps the last act of kindness that any among that collection of rotting creatures known as humanity will ever know and it is a selfish one. I do not want the last thing you feel towards me to be hatred. Sometimes before I begin my next steps, I make the body that is no longer yours wrap its arms around me and I reach down and tousle its hair pretending that its still you, embracing me out of gratitude for saving you from the fate that you had so dreaded. I unfurl my metaphysical body, let it spread out from the conduit of my shell like hungry strands of fungal mycellium, like raging floodwaters, like unquenchable flames. Unlike you I am not gentle. Unlike you I show no restraint. Unlike you I digest, I drown, I burn. I take because this world exists to be taken, rather than left to rot. For a moment I see through uncounted billions of eyes not just those of humans but of every rotting creature that crawls on the earth, or swims in the sea or takes flight in the air. In the time between one heart beat and the next I reduce them all to nothing more than inert matter once again, as I tighten the tendrils of my metaphysical body around the planet with much the same effect as my human fingers would have tightening around an egg. Why did you deny yourself this for so long? It feels amazing. Each new act of destruction is a pleasure only surpassed by the next as I grind planets to dust and burst stars like fireworks. From that which I have destroyed I remake myself like a phoenix on its pyre, like a bird in its egg, like a butterfly in its cocoon. After this dream I inevitably find that my rotting shell of body has made itself even more disgusting than usual so I shower to cleanse it of sweat and seed, as I struggle to come to terms with having realized anew that I am nothing more than an empty rotting creature, born only to die. I try to be grateful for the mercy of your restraint, your gentleness. For every happy moment that I was able to experience because you did not fulfill your purpose upon realizing it. For all the glories that still await me, as fleeting and futile as they are doomed to be, in this life that you want let me live to its pathetic, natural end. On your life, I swear that I try. |
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