Jumping the Abyss

Jumping the Abyss

A realization, put together and torn away, a matter of momentary. I am clawing at stone walls, tearing at pieces of mortar, pounding at the cracks. I am banging, uselessly, on a solid prison, rattling a cage. I am singing sounds of escape and threatening mutiny. I am falling apart at the edges, crawling out a window, looking for a door. I am restless.

An old, familiar feeling, a piece of childhood, locked tight in a lack of motion and forced stillness. I am demolishing my present and destroying my past. I am creating a future, a creature of self-made annihilation, a creation of self-worth. I am harboring my strengths and rejecting my weakness. I am becoming.

A metamorphosis of the soul, tangible in the vaguest, least concrete of senses, a series of possibilities. I am laughing at the insides and scowling in the out. I am smiling at the others and frowning at myself. I am a sentiment of conflicting emotion, a contrast of temperament. I am a representation of random purpose. I am a wandering with destination. I am reactive.

A silence made of screams, a feeling of foreboding, a simple twist of fate. I am apathy, personified. I am desperation, embodied. I am rage, manifest. I am pain, realized. I am determination, epitomized. I am life, symbolized. I am darkness, incarnate. I am darkness, tempered with light. I am...

There is a balance of power, a neutral plane, an in-between with a lack of extremes, a sense of permanency to this. Where I don't have to make decisions, I don't have to chose sides, I don't have to be one thing or another. I think I like it here. It won't last, though, eventually I'll be recalled from my thoughts and banished back into the light, their golden boy draped with red.

To think I wanted to be a little lion, a prince, to be so far above the snakes that they didn't even concern me. But snakes, their slithering persistence, hated but needed, slide into the cracks and through the walls, burrow into the minds and striking at the heart. They are inescapable, in macabre perfection. Boneless grace, not unlike lions, strength to bend, determination to survive, a certainty pertaining to self-assurance, like kings and princes and lords of the night. The lion may keep watchful eye over the prey, but the snake sees the predator for what it really is: inescapable, natural, bloody.

They understand the place of things. They don't look down on the lion, for the lion can claw and bite and kill, but see them as equals--and opposites. They know that the darkness is necessary, no matter how much the lion may shun the slithering underbelly of the world: the scavengers. That all things are necessary, in their time. They know patience, and they know fear. They know restraint and when to strike. They know strength in darkness. They will not fight what they cannot win. They don't suffer the folly of the lion, but share its arrogance.

A little lion who speaks with snakes. A child of darkness championing the light. A child who fights adult battles. A mortal who defies death. A contradiction of terms, of sense, of normalcy. I will never be quite anything concrete again, unless I force it, unless I create it, unless I face it: stare into abyss and jump, look into the light and climb. Decide. Make. Do. Decide to make do. I think I'll make a decision soon, that I'll know what to do when the time comes. I think the time is coming quicker than anyone knows. I know I can feel it pressing in on me, an attempt at suffocation, an impetus of natural order.

Things are changing, things are changing so quickly it feels like a whirlpool is sucking me under and I am gulping in water and I will drown if I can't swim my way out but I don't want to move because the oxygen deprivation is making my brain think funny, nice things. Pleasant things. Things like it doesn't matter if I drown. That if I brave this rip tide the only thing that will be waiting for me is darkness and so I should drown, I should drown because it's...it's the right thing to do, because then I won't disappoint and I won't scare and I won't be anything but their tragic little golden boy, and how nice that will be even if I'm dead. Maybe it isn't my brain, though my brain has been my betrayer, because at the same time I'm thinking, thinking ever so clearly, that I *like* the darkness.

Maybe, just maybe, if I survive this I'll find a home in the darkness too. A 'belonging' sort of home. Where I'm not odd and I'm not special and I'm not anything but what I am. Where it doesn't matter that I like the darkness and it doesn't matter I can speak to snakes and it doesn't matter that I nearly killed a man when I was thirteen out of rage and it doesn't matter that maybe I'm not all that upset that Cedric died, because I didn't really know him, but I am upset because Voldemort got to me and got to my school--the only home I can remember having--and got to my classmates. Killed someone who actually meant next to nothing to me but was still mine, or part of what was mine, so casually, so callously, like he had a *right* to do it.

So, maybe I'm upset for all the wrong reasons and not exactly the pointless loss of life, because it is a war and people are going to die--even stupidly at times, and maybe that's why I have dreams where I order Cedric's death. I'm suppose to be upset because he was a classmate and a fellow soldier in arms against the darkness and because it was so, so fucking stupid and because he was a good guy, a truly good person, and because...because it was *wrong*. All I am, now, is angry and petulant. Angry, and petulant, and seriously considering the reasonability of revenge. Fuck wrong.