#;tragedy

You try to make sense of the chaos and I am the eternal abyss that sleeps within, who helplessly looks on as you try to simplify something that simply cannot be put into words. They are your confines, these words, and the way they are written is the way you build your cage.

              These are your instructions.               Square away everything. Throw away what isn’t needed: your sanity, mostly, because who               needs something as silly as that in a world that might as well be a black hole?

You are staring into the mouth of a cave and you step into it and you realise too late that your flashlights are out of battery. That is the moment when you know you’ve tasted something you shouldn’t have, that you’re lost, that there is no hope of ever calling out for help because why do that when you can try and navigate your way through all on your own?                             (You don’t. You can't.)

And you find yourself lost on flesh, lost on a map of reds and purples and the occasional blue cracks lining pink. A whole spectrum, a whole rainbow on your map, and you find yourself lost without knowing where north is, but finding north is not going help you when all your life you’ve been going south.

All roads lead back to the start and the start is where you remember eating them. The ones with the warm smiles, the ones who tell you that acting human is the closest thing you can get to survival and ghouls probably weren’t meant to live if they kept getting picked off by humans, and their own lot.                             (They were wrong.)

All roads lead back to when your mind was still in one peace and I wasn’t here yet – but where’s the fun in that?

I am your Dark Passenger, and this road trip has lasted for long enough and you’ve driven for too long. The steering wheel has engraved itself onto your palms and that is why they are so rough. Your feet do not know the ground anymore because it’s too busy flooring it, and that’s why I have to intervene sometimes.

Sometimes you remember the start, and sometimes you want to take that road. I am the one that makes you take a turn away from it. I remind you why we’re not going back.

We can never go back, because you will realise as I did that this road leads nowhere but despair and misery, and try as you might to deny it you are not a psychopath.

              You feel too much, and that is something I must now correct.

(There is a girl, you think, who’s different, and that’s not right, because they’re all the same, they’re all the same: have you seen how easily she blushed with your words? You’ve touched her and you haven’t even held her hand yet. We are not a tragic romance. Girls will not be our downfall. Hearts aren't our weakness.)

Kim Seokjin has a nasty habit of thinking of himself too often, usually in high regard, and rarely ever holding contempt towards his own nature. How could he? He was powerful and beautiful, and the price was duly paid with every waking moment, and even as he slept.

( Sleep no more!            Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep. )

There would be no reprieve from nightmares for as long as he was alive, and as horrid as it may sound, he didn’t truly mind. He felt no sadness or fear, not for his own psyche, and not when he was constantly plagued by his own psychosis that it only became background noise, something he could ignore if he diverted his attention to other things – mostly his hunger.

He was getting careless, he knew, but lately there were nightmares that weren’t…nightmares.

He felt like a spectator to his own demise. In another lifetime, in another world, he was hell itself and flowers grew atop graves he’d pushed people into. His hands were no longer soaked with blood, as they were when he was conscious and when he was not, and instead they were clean – frankly, this terrified him more than anything else. To be pure was to be fragile, powerless. White would always be stained and it was best with red.

             ( It will have blood: they say blood will have blood. )

But in his dreams he was the source of crimson, and in these dreams he was in the arms of warm death. There he knew she killed him, this angel of retribution who wept for him and kissed him until she was the last thing he could remember.

He would wake from this dream in cold sweat, wondering how he could possibly feel anything other than hatred and pure hunger, replaced by longing and indescribable fear for something inevitable. If he could see her face in his dreams he was sure he’d remember it when he awoke, and if that happened, he was sure that this girl from his nightmares would haunt him at every vulnerable moment.

Midnight snacks in the form of vulnerable young people always solved the problem, and as this presented itself again, he put on decent clothes, fixed his hair, and headed out into the blackest night.

             ( Something wicked this way comes. )

There was one unchanged factor, of course: in his waking dreams and slumbering terrors, he would always be the one to antagonise.

He was always the villain, and he knew nothing more than to be the antagonist of every story.

This was what he thought as he bit into the shoulder of yet another victim – this hunger was getting out of control, but what else did he have? Where else could he get power from?

At least, it was comforting to know that despite the turbulent nature of his mind, there would always be a constant. He would be the predator, and trusting little humans, his prey.

And he enjoyed her, this midnight snack,

                                     down to the bone,                                                  licking it clean.                                      relishing the blood --                                       liquid gold,                                          the meat --                pure heaven.

and dreamt of darkness and power throughout the night.