_
Sanctuary
If a linear perception of time is sacrosanct, my perspective is blasphemy.
I'd like to meet you halfway just so I could begin to understand myself and its function.
The stars visible in the night sky are uncountable, seemingly infinite.
Fingers trembling. Watching them blink out of existence, dozens at a time.
Pupils widening with a distinct grasp on existential pain.
Physical. Tangible.
Pain.
Hand closing into a fist. Nails digging into the fabric of my gloves.
Blood staining. Dripping from the shaking cracks of my fists.
Close my eyes in a desperate effort to escape.
I am on a beach.
I am in my destiny.
I am on my island.
I am watching seashells being consumed by the tide.
The tide consumes a great deal of things.
It stains the sand and takes my friends away from me.
Riku and I are running, laughing.
Catch a glance where he's breaking character.
Dropping the facade.
My heart pumping.
Breath tearing its way through my esophagus.
Kairi.
Setting us off at the starting line.
Waiting for us at the finish line.
Her cheers echoing from that dark, empty cave.
Splinters from the handle of the wooden sword in my desperate grip tearing through the fabric of my gloves.
Flesh reshaping around them.
Succumbing to their form.
Adapting.
Accommodating.
Sacrificing.
The flesh of the worthless is an obstacle to everything else.
The things that matter.
Being pliable is a virtue.
The blood feeds the weapon.
The weapon transforms.
The world benefits from my lack of obstruction once again.
The remaining stars begin to smear across the sky above me.
As if being wiped casually away by the lazy hand of god.
Sun flickering in and out with time skips.
At night the treehouses burn brightly. Beating back against the rain.
Roaring at it viciously.
As if the elements themselves were at war.
Shadows dancing. Flickering across the island.
During the flashes of the day, the shadows are more deliberate.
More elaborate.
Defined.
The voices of my friends are disconnected from their bodies.
Their actions and movements independent from their cheering.
They are cheering for us. Cheering for Riku.
When Riku wins, the crowd explodes.
As I land on my face in the sand.
As part of my front tooth snaps off. Sending a triangular chip at full speed to the back of my throat.
Almost choking on it.
The adoration for the cause of my suffering fills my head with static.
Rain adds to the cacophony.
As do the cries of fear and pain. Similarly to being scalped, my brain only understands the thunderous roar of the components that keep it together being torn apart.
This is how the truth felt when I was taken from my island.
The tide never stops licking the sand.
That is a constant.
The ocean's swelling echoing throughout the stability of my equilibrium.
Another disconnect.
The sand, the very ground beneath my feet begins to crack apart.
Shadows leaking through on both timelines.
The nature of the weapon in my hand has changed.
It is no longer a conduit for fun or sport. Considering everything, it never really has been.
But now, the wooden sword in my hand is a key. A key to unlock something I don't and may never understand.
Riku's corpse floating face down in the pool by the mouth of the cave.
The depths of that cave teeming with a manner of life my consciousness can't even begin to understand.
Not just shadows.
Not just darkness.
Something more sinister than that.
Something alive.
Grab Riku by the shoulder and gently turn him over.
Waterlogged. Bloated.
Vacant windows to the void where his soul should be.
Blood and brain matter remnants stained around the dark, empty sockets.
Veins thick and black under his swollen blue skin.
His lips left where I kissed them. Slightly parted.
A centipede escapes his mouth. It crawls across his cheek and disappears into his ratty, rotting, once angelic hair.
I can't help but feel partially responsible for this.
He is holding his hands outstretched towards me.
Beckoning.
My fingers trembling. Knees desperately trying to buckle.
His tongue dances gracefully across his smirk. Eyes full of seduction.
I don't want to admit how badly I want to run to him.
I hate the part of me that's afraid of myself like this.
Afraid of him like this.
Afraid of feelings.
Afraid.
Eyes widen.
Riku's with Kairi now.
Does she look scared, or do I just want her to be?
Has Riku's soul been consumed by its own darkness? By the darkness of the world around him?
Stolen and possessed by the sinister entities or spirits?
Was he fucking eaten by something I don't understand or is it just easier for me to think he was?
Flashes of kissing him on the mouth.
Flashes of my hand down his pants. His soft, soothing moans vibrating outwardly into my ear and neck. Sending shivers down my back, my spine.
My weakness is his arms and being in them.
Teeth sinking into the soft flesh just below my jaw.
Fingers closing around a handful of his hair.
Other hand clasping around the shaft of his dick inside his pants. He's circumcised.
Firm grip on the base, gently tugging. Kissing him intensifies.
Rubbing. Caressing.
Trying to make him feel as warm and weak as he's making me feel.
Desperately doing what I can to make him feel the ways I always want to feel.
The ways I always *need* to feel.
Wanted.
Needed.
Loved.
Want to feel needed.
Need to feel loved.
Love to feel wanted.
I look back up into his fluorescent blue eyes.
Like spotlights shining down on me.
I am the stage. His eyeline like the light of god.
The light of heaven, where melting's not bad.
Where deterioration is more beautiful than tragic.
A place where things are as they should be.
Perspective now is tense.
Strained.
My hand shakes.
Everything is always falling apart.
I picture kissing him again.
It's happening right now and I'm a part of that.
It's another time and my thumb's knuckles are scraping, as the flesh between them tears, at the sockets that once framed his gorgeous and fully functional eyeballs.
When he had gorgeous and fully functional eyeballs.
Sobbing over his corpse.
Into his corpse.
Vomit escapes me as if it were carbon dioxide.
Breathing in gas and breathing out liquid.
His eyes would be wide open if he had them.
Riku.
My best friend.
Where the stars crash into the ocean on the horizon; blinding light concentrates, then expands.
Not quite an explosion. Moreso ground zero for the complete erasure of this world around me.
Everything as I understood it prior to my understanding caving in on itself - perhaps because of it. A catalyst.
We had such big plans to explore the world, and I failed even to explore myself.
But if that were true, why would ground zero occur where I can see instead of where I stand?
The irony is not lost on me. My lack of understanding radiates from me in capacities I can't and won't and don't understand.
Cause and effect.
Action and reaction.
I become the world's problem as the world becomes mine.
A mutually nonconsensual affair, like two parasites feeding off each other.
Feeding off what's keeping us alive until it's gone.
And as the blinding light consumes me, I feel neither more freedom nor additional despair.
My suffering is stagnant.
I have been in stasis for seven years.
It finally dawns on me that this is what this is.
Stasis.
Riku's corpse floats in the antithesis of the void.
This is everything. Pure light.
Infinite potential.
I am the fool.
The cadaver floats over its own shadow.
Even here, merely existing comes at a price.
I have seen the void, and there's something to be said for the truth and freedom that comes with it.
The freedom to give up, the freedom to give in, the freedom to embrace not existing.
Nothingness.
I was wrong about this place. My suffering grows.
Eyes widen involuntarily as a staircase comes into focus.
A small figure attempting to ascend the endless spiral to nowhere from nothing.
Nobody. Or, maybe not.
Maybe it's me.
Maybe it's a projection or a memory struggling for its very right to exist.
Desperately fighting off demons to maintain a basic will to live.
To keep moving.
Simply to struggle.
Swinging around that wretched key - the key that seems to lock more doors than it opens.
The key arrived with the onus to change that which is explicitly beyond my comprehension.
How can I change myself if I don't know myself?
How can I know myself if I can't bear to look at what I see?
Even now, I avert my gaze from the towering spiral of steps.
Looking away from the very thing that's chipping away at my capacity to desire existence.
As I pivot, as I turn away from the corpse and the struggle in favor of a comfortable nothing to focus on for just a moment, the images return.
Grabbing my focus.
The corpse.
The ascent.
Myself. Me.
My footing will change.
My hands will shake.
Water cascading down the staircase towards me.
And still I climb and fight. Climb and fight.
And still I'm forced to watch what I understand as true hopelessness consume me.
Instead of just hopelessness manufactured for the sake of avoiding disappointment and heartache.
The art of can't instead of don't wish to.
My eyes clench themselves shut.
Instead of the darkness, the void that I yearn for, inside of me is more of the blank slate.
Unfortunate potentiality.
I see her face.
Namine.
I watch her cup her hands to catch another dying ember.
Her beautiful skin is atrophying around her delicate bones.
Words hang on her lips - angels and flies.
Consumed by this tragedy, I feel myself falling. Spiraling.
My lungs are filled with water.
My lungs are filled with blood.
My eyes are open as my feet touch the void.
Again, I am the fool.
Anything multiplied by zero is zero.
This is not what I wanted.
As I look upon my trembling fingers, eyes following down my wrists, to my arms, to my body, I discover that I am officially not myself.
This is the me that doesn't make it.
This is the me that truly is without hope.
