I walked to the gate slowly, dragging my fingers along the twisted angles of metal that had been bent and worked into a chain link fence, muttering quips and lines that I would maybe use for a future poem. As I met the gate and undid the clasp that gave the illusion of security to those who shelter themselves within, me being one of them, I thought I saw a figure just barely out of my peripheral vision.
As I shifted my focus toward the looming shadow of dusk that was slowly chasing the daylight away, it became apparent to me that the figure was not that at all. It held no shape, no outline. I couldn't tell where it began and the world around it ended. Formless but yet somehow humanoid in appearance, the apparition started to slosh toward me. Its movements appearing slow at first, catching and holding me in its hypnotic writhing of its lack of substance. As it loomed closer, it gained speed and the appearance of form became even more unintelligible. Its hold on me broken as the icy tendrils of fear dragged themselves down my spine, and in that moment, I recognized the demon for its true nature. It was ink.
Heart racing, I secured the latch that I was glued to mere seconds ago, and began my sprint to the apartment door. Too many seconds lost in fumbling fingers searching for the key that would unlock my sanctuary. I could hear it now, the infinite screams of words so carelessly left behind in my eagerness to share my mind with the world. The door finally granted me passage and slamming the lock, I gasped for breath that I was unaware had escaped me. The ink slammed itself against the door with fury, flopping and thrashing against it, rattling the frame whose integrity had never been tested by the might of untamed words.
Like a crazed school of fish or flock of birds that has been tricked by the allure of the sky through the transparency of a pane of glass, the ink slammed itself again and again against the window of the door, careless and unforgiving. I understood it’s reason for chase, it’s purpose for existing. As the glass began to crack in front of me, I knew it had come to consume me, and that the me that stood in putrid terror, staring eyes wide, unable to move, would be no more. I watched the vein of space between the cracked glass grow in a spider web of weakness, and I found peace while I calmly awaited the gnashing fangs of the ink to shred my body, mind, and soul. I welcomed it.
