The Thrill of Being Chased

 

Trigger warning!!! The hunt begins in imagination where fear and graving carefully dance. Some games are meant to stay unplayed.

....

I feel your presence behind me,

Danger fills my body,

I like our little game of cat and mouse in the dark forest,

Feeling scared is what makes me feel alive.

…

Through the lens of a dark romance reader

I explore what I hid so shamefully within my mind,

Always craving one particular hunt,

Forbidden fantasies, taboo attraction,

My inner fire burns my skin from the inside.

…

Your shadow lingers in the corner pitch-black,

My throat aches for the firmness of your grip,

I want the weakness to consume me,

I don’t want to feel safe.

With you it is so easy, always ready to play these games with me

And flirting with my demons – never bored, a constant thrill.

My nose recognizes you even when you follow at a distance,

Trying to keep it low, blending into the scenery, leaving no trace.

The stillness of your breath has mapped my spine,

Tattoo of a new kind, where every shiver is a prelude to pleasure,

Never – ending sweet pain.

I let the fear sink deeply into my bones,

Marks of possession, so well-known to me.

I walk through the empty alleys knowing you can catch me anytime,

While the safety of the forest holds our wickedness at bay.

…

You make your presence clear, your raspy voice telling me to run away

Your fiend cannot wait any longer, the cage not strong enough to contain it,

You and I – a game of predator and prey.

You caught me or I let you – we will keep it as it looks to untrained eyes.

The chase is over, time to unleash what we carefully hid,

And the night is our only witness as the game ends here,

Where our wickedness begins.

The Switch

 

And after all these years, today I allowed myself to feel all the pain, happiness, exhaustion and hopelessness. I’ve been numb for more than two years. I have mastered the art of looking cheerful and hopeful, masking the indifference with female rage, looking angry when something looks unfair. What scares me the most is that I mastered the art of using the “right” emotion when everything in me is barren. The flatness of my voice is only heard by me when I stare in the mirror every morning, trying to convince the reflection to choose to be human just for a day. Needless to say that all my efforts were in vain.

Today is different - I thought how dull everything around me is; the grayness of snowless winter usually plays cruel tricks on me and I occasionally fall victim to my consciousness and give up on my robotic life for an hour or two.

I decided to give myself an hour, barely made it for a whole 30 minutes. All the feelings flooded me at once; my senses were in overload as if I were an old machine trying to install new software – totally incompatible. My head spun, overwhelmed by moments I carefully locked in my mental metal box, stored away like an emergency kit when I am badly hurt. And honestly, I didn’t like it. Everything I had carefully “forgotten” and ignored came back slapping me hard in the face. I even felt how my heart ached from every choice I had made and deemed wrong. I felt the same weakness which scared me 7 years ago. This was the same sensation that pushed me to seal off my humanity and start the game of pretending.

In the beginning I was bad at it, really bad. It felt impossible but then it clicked. I was looking in the mirror – eyes empty, no will to live but my face moved differently. My mouth pronounced the right words effortlessly, at the right time, with the correct intonation and even my eyes started sparkling with the proper amount of joy. On that day my career of perfecting the art of being heartless began. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a choice I made just to try. I made up my mind after another disappointment and all the pain it brought to my already damaged soul. This was never my first choice but my last chance to survive. And I did it. I survived… barely.

Now my safety mechanism has become my curse. It takes more and more to go back to how I used to be, not to feel foreign to myself. And when it becomes too heavy for me to handle, the switch turns on. Nothing – this is my favourite setting. I admit it’s not the most brilliant plan but at least I am still here – numb but here.

30 minutes – the only time in more than two years I felt the grief and love I can give to anyone and to myself. And when the pain is intolerable - game on. I turned off, again. Enough tears, enough ache, enough frustration, enough anger. I am letting the protective shell to consume me until I find another way to heal. In the meantime, I will keep performing as if I am living normally, day by day.

Verbless

 

Days spent in an environment fast-paced,

Nights drowned in a daze – slow motion.

Lives lived in parallel realities, in complete collusion

Of who I am and who I pretend to be.

A rack of masks, a collection of emotions

None of them is meant to last.

…

Constant conflicts, constant fights,

A race for dominance over no one’s life.

Years of living under the familiar pretenses,

Stage of elaborate acts, theater of pain.

…

My life lacks the verbs, I use only nouns,

An occasional adjective, thrown in the mix,

Adverbs replace the full sentences,

I avoid the clearness of my thoughts.

One-word answers, this is what I use

Too tired to explain what I really mean.

This world feels like one-pager;

A document for fast consumption.

The poetry is too emotionally charged,

Too sensitive, some days even complex for the exhausted brain.

The novel is too long, too many connections, several plots –

A composition that requires effort in the era of the quick story, three minutes long.

…

I hold my breath between the endless tries and failures,

Every exhale attempts apologies I never wanted to convey.

Every tomorrow feels like debt I refuse to pay,

My hopes are stacked, hidden where my drafts are laid to rest.

Every minute I unwind feels like another task on the to-do list I fill out each morning;

Another thing I am too tired to do right.

More and more often these days I am the scent I leave behind,

A faint fragrance on the note that no one reads.

 

Urban Shadow

 

The Dawn is running away from me as if I am cursed

Leaving me restless, unsure if I can survive the day.

How I am supposed to know what is best for me,

What will silence the noises of the mindless routine?

How am I meant to handle the burdens alone

When the sadness is my second skin?

So lost I don’t know where to start from.

I am circling in confusion – how should I behave?

I refuse to continue this pointless day.

In the daze I remain motionless – I don’t remember what I have accomplished,

What I have built is unstable – the architect in me is dead.

…

I taste the borrow guilts instilled in me,

I feel the passion sleeping underneath those accusations.

How could I tell what is best for me

When the night keeps occupying every cell,

When my pride is gone for so long.

I crave my runs under the morning sky

When the air feels crisp and untainted,

To feel the lushness of the grass under my bare feet,

To scream the fears out the way I used to,

To shout and then to stop on the edge of the cliff.

…

And yet here we are – on the crossroad of the days passed

The reflection of the lessons learnt and what should be improved,

The place where I should make the choice – to avoid the wrong turn.

But the perception is through someone else’s eyes…

And yet I cannot go back to what I was – a forgotten wasteland now,

The loneliness floods back in full force – I cannot be different.

…

Despite my wrong doings, I cannot betray what is in me  

Even though I am the one who destroys what doesn’t serve me anymore

And leaves it behind, no turning back.

I blend with the new scenery – a different place, a different version of me.

…

There is no point for reaching out, this is how I am built.

Like the monuments I leave behind, I am one with the city – once on the spotlight

Then part of the charm of that abandoned street.

Now transparent, a shadow, a ghost of eternity.

Sad Symphony

 

(Reflection of the poem written when I was 14)

 

Eyes dried, hollow,

Shadows dancing behind the hazel hues,

Darkness in its finest,

Dreaded obscurity.

The mind preoccupied from thoughts scattered from past, present and of what it could happens,

Infinite ideas, pathways easy and hard,

Like a game, I reach another level, new quest immediately pops out.

Life is not that simple, not so straight forward, no code behind the visuals.

I can hear my young self nervously pacing, holding that one paper rose,

The hands are as empty as the heart - isolation as huge as the Artic Ocean,

Frozen in time.

Symbolic shire on the little vanity, picture from the days when thirty-something woman was a call from the future,

Never anticipated, only now matters - grow little flower, fly little bird.

Yet I am still escaping the reality into the writings,

Still in denial, still soul-searching; some habits never change.

Palette in greys, thorns hugging the soul, ache is what still dominates the life.

Mental weeds grow instead of lush meadows – imagination semi-working, a lot has passed.

I keep sinking into the oblivion like I used to,

My inner fireplaces no longer keep me warm,

I have abandoned the prayers – they were never answered,

Only anxiety is lingering beneath the cheerful smile.

The Self-love never practiced is tearing me apart,

The tears stopped visiting me – as withered as what I profusely refuse to release.

And in this moment, I do realize how the young ghosts quietly show through the same fears

Flashback from years long gone yet so relevant.

…

The eyelids are shutting down; the calmness of the void remains the sweetness I constantly crave.

My shriek continues to devour me.

Even now the pain remains as sharp as before,

The sweet memories are getting more bitter

And keep inflicting the old, hidden, drenched in unrest Loneliness.

Written in the Dark

 

In the abyss of memories, I stay rooted, collapsed into exhaustion

You are nowhere to be found,

Sun cannot shine in this bit of battlefield of snippets of happy times.

I am clutching this book again,

Ready to relive what was, like a fly in the cobweb of what could have been,

Overthinking every action, every word’s hidden meaning.

Conversations on repeat, the outcome - still the same.

Tears falling like spring streams,

At least I have survived.

…

Growling voices surrounding me,

Inner demons surface from underneath a troubled mind.

Their company is what I enjoy best,

Dancing with the cruel beast in the rhythm of lost souls

Vibrant tunes, ugly faces – they are still mine.

Dark fantasies played before these blue eyes,

Restless is the hearth.

…

In the end the morning comes to undo what the night knitted under its voidness,

Silence will never be my friend, serves me nothing but distress.

If the thoughts can burn then I am already in ashes

Willing to fly when morning breeze is ready to play.

If the feelings are tides, then I am at bottom of the emotional ocean,

Buried tempests and outer freezing gusts – this is what I have become,

Still turning the pages of the book of life I have written when I mattered most

Now a cherished treasure, like a reflection in the mirror never telling lies but yet never speaks the full truths;

Lookalike wearing the best mask while hiding the rotten images of poisoned consciousness.

I drift in daydreams, lost in the countless unchosen paths of coming back to my senses,

Yet without my shadows I am utterly incomplete.

I keep writing chapters of my unnamed self until I break fully down,

Until I give up the final spark of the soul I still cling to.