Nature
The demon licks my face, feeding the turmoil going on inside my mind. It proposes so many good ideas. It speaks about the state of things, the truth of me. To argue back is insanity. I accept the sense oozing out of the demon’s hot red tongue. With every wet lick, with every spit dripping down my face, I feel a sense of liberation. I don’t have to decide. All I have to do is relinquish my heart.
I take my heart out of my chest, yanking it out with a force that I didn’t know how to do. The strings of my heart attached to my chest are painful spikes, reminding me of something I cannot remember. The throb against my fingers is an unknown rhythm—agitated, alienated. I watch the blood pool against my fingers and wonder what I am supposed to remember. I am supposed to remember something; that much I am sure of.
The demon lets its tongue flop against its black skeleton cheek. It expects my heart.
I lock my gaze with its burrowed eyes, reflecting my colorless face. The person whose face belongs to it is the one I remember, watching me back as a kid without hope, idea, nothing, but a hollowed-out existence of motion after motion.
There is a laugh, and it startles me. I am surprised to find it belongs to my lips. That my tongue flaps inside my mouth as my lips part their way. The clicking of my teeth as I seal my mouth shut rattles the room like the gears of a clockwork.
Without my heart, the demon promises that I will have everything. The child goes away, and I will be left standing strong. Just give the heart; that’s all.
The demon shakes impatiently. Its long limbs quivering with every prolonged second. Heart, it pleads. Heart, it states. Heart, it demands.
But exist inside me. It asks about the heart, about the child, about the future. It sees no life without the heart.
The demon promises that the pain from the strings will go away. There is no pain. Nothing but richness and power. All one could want.
But I think. But I feel. The premise is wrong. That is what my heart argues through the spiked pain. The truth, the reality, is wrong: creation, creativity—not money, not power—meaning and action twisted in one. I remember that child now. It didn’t need anything. It needed imagination, curiosity. They would never yield to a demon; why should I, as an adult, yield to those burrowed, hollowed eyes?
“No.” I push my heart back in.
—
What I got today was all the materials for a great story with a plot. All I wish for when I use the random number generator to raffle the specs for the story. I got a lyrical horror story about overcoming a monster, written in the third person. I could have written a good monster story, yet this was what came out. It was the first sentence that altered everything; it became more of a flow of ideas, of personal growth. It shaped the point of view into first person rather than third, and I couldn’t do anything but follow. So no blaming me. Okay, you can do that. I would.
I know where the story came from. I just watched a video about how we allocate blame to a person instead of the surroundings. How we quote studies and experiments as something real, telling us about human nature: proposing we are greedy, lazy, selfish creatures. And based on those assumptions, we shape the world and wonder why mental illness is rising, why people do drugs, why there are more and more people falling through the cracks and pacify themselves into mindless dullness. The rat experiments suggest that the fallen are just lazy, and politicians and all sorts of experts demand that they pull themselves together, telling success stories of heroic nature and singing songs about the greedy, lazy, selfish human nature. Yet, they get it wrong. The rat studies are done with distressed, alienated animals that are separated from other rats and forced into solitary confinement. They state why the rats drink their opioids and define human nature. And there we have a perfectly distorted view of human nature for politicians and experts to use to push us into our little solitary boxes to work for Nike shoes and that red sports car we all need to have.
Sigh. Sorry about the rant. I’m just mad. I see my government institutions shutting down funding for rehabilitation programs because they see humans through just this lens, thinking every person is there to be a free-rider. So many kids’ futures are drastically altered by a distorted view of human nature and by politics and ideologies.
Thank you for reading! Have a creative, demon-free day ❤
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