A Nebulous Terror

How can I begin to uproot this nebulous terror which has engulfed me so gently that I hadn’t felt it until it had strangled all of the hope and joy from this great period of rebirth? My still moments are haunted by inaudible fears and languishing, buried underneath the hum of the quietest states of my mind.

I am confronting a sickness whose face I can only see in my dreams, when I entertain stories of solo expeditions over frozen wastes. I have become the plaything of an evil that rests cleanly outside the corners of my vision, whose shape I can only feel when I have just turned out the lights.

Did my love bring this terror to me? Did I desecrate some holy thing whose earth I did not recognize? Who am I, scholar of the whirlwind, to ask if I deserve to be the victim of such a thing? What sense is there in the things that have set themselves onto the people I love? What sense is there in my absent friends, my hollow brothers, the salt-flats of my life as a new, less tethered man?

I only know how freely the tears come when I am offered comfort. I feel the load of my mere flesh buckle the structures beneath when I am asked if I am okay. And yet, I have so little to lament. Should I cry that I am lonely now that I have so deftly killed in order to be free? Can I allow myself to deserve the touch of another when I have so readily tasted blood? Can I reconvene with the water of that lost covenant, and bow to the fire, when I have ripped myself so suddenly and perfectly clean of all that it is to be human? What force can carry me back when I have so happily begun to spiral out, with nothing left to throw in the hope that it will end my flight?

To call this place a machine which snags and smashes these arrogant insects among its leviathan complexity is a step too far removed from the pain it is to be one of those fragile denizens. I am witness to the rolling hills of purgatory, without a tree in sight or stone whose lee might spare these ghostly, transient forms, and among the lot of us packs of dogs greet the long-dead for a final handshake with their master.

My fate, earned or not, is to see my sons beheaded before me, such that it is my final sight, before these papercraft angels pluck out my eyes. What will I have deserved when no one remembers me?