𝖌𝖚𝖙 𝖋𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝖔𝖋 𝖗𝖔𝖙.

I remember a white door —  I remember it was the hibiscus winter — I remember thinking I had been comatose a thousand years, though this is surely false, and in my uncorroborated absence the whole fungible world in a moment of chemical agony had changed in irreversible ways — I remember how everything tasted dark —  I remember things I’ve never felt — a seagull feather brushing my lips, a turquoise shell, my shoulders festooned with flowers — I remember thinking what was in my mind was put there by others, by books I read, by objects I looked at but did not own — I remember wondering if other memories remained in the twilight regions of my mind where my failed loves were soil, and if soon someone would enlighten me to things I had done and then, years later, I would remember them as real — I remember tender hands covered in snow — I remember the city, the flames immanent as flowers,  patient to burst forth — I remember my favourite word once was —

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls. In that, it is no different or less controversial, than humor, and no less intimate than sex. Our rejection or acceptance of a particular type of horror can be rarefied or kinky as any other phobia or fetish.

Poe grappled with the darker side of mankind, with the demons that reside within us: our mind, a crumbling edifice, so king slowly in a swamp of decadence and madness. He knew that a rational, good-hearted man could, when ridden by demons, sink a knife in the eye of a beloved cat and gouge it out. He could strangle an old man or burn alive his enemies. He knew that those dark impulses can shape us, overtake us, make us snap—and yet, we would still be able to function, we would still presume to possess the power of rational thought. Why would anyone say we are mad?