Escape from Terror

I can not begin to describe what an ordeal this year has been. Once again I have fresh and profound injuries that are yet to break down from the rubied crust of recent pain...to crystallize and turn from an obscuring scab to an illuminating lens. I value my ordeal. I value the fear I feel of him and the pity I have evolved to experience.

Yes- to me he was real and terrifying and 1000 storeys tall...as attackers all seem to the individual and to no one else.

Some time has now passed and, yes, I am stronger- but the public is a barbed arena and his presence toxically fills the room. To exist within the same room is as to breathe excrement. But ultimately, I pull back the curtains on the phantasm. And to find there is no great and terrible Oz...only a failed shrunken soul hiding behind a terrifying veneer. No troops may attack the fort, but then no friends will come to feast.

I have taken my leave and in the arms of a golden-heart, I am finally warm.

In the cold, dead-skin greyness of his heavily-gargoyled fortress; he is a meagre frail old prisoner. Chains of the years have embedded within his thin, wrinkled membrane and his looking slits are milky and dull from so many years without light.

I walk now, stronger, clearer, wiser, away from the terror as I walk into the dawn's light as it falls upon the land and the deep, concrete night is at an end.