Unmasking the Enemy
Through the past six years, when I began this intricate description of my life through the guise of the Hero and his enemy, the Darkness, I have lost. I have utterly, completely lost.
I wrote so often of discovering the true nature of the enemy. I said that he created me, made me what I was. For it is through purpose that we are defined, not through our action, or thoughts. Purpose. The purpose for me was discovering that evil and overcoming it, not falling into its clutches. I wrote six years ago, in March, that I felt myself slipping ever so slowly into the "warm clutches of evil". I asked myself, what fruit would it take? What could it tear from me that would be so dear, so necessary to my personality, that it would drive me into oblivion. Not only would I be defeated by the Darkness, but I would be consumed by it, become it entirely. There would be no more distinction between the Hero and the Darkness. The progeny would become the progenitor. It was inevitable, and I should have seen it coming, but hindsight is always painfully lucid.
The Darkness took my passion. It slowly drained away the very essence of what was me, what was the Hero, and with each battle I fought I slipped more and more away from it, into complacency, into normalcy, into reality. Here I sit, a mere shell of the person I once was, consuming myself with the repetitive machinations of everyday life. I have ceased to feel, ceased to think, and, in many ways, ceased to exist. But through this failure I believe I have gained my greatest victory to date. I have unmasked the Enemy.
The Darkness that I felt tugging at my soul was the elimination of the Darkness itself, and the Hero along with it. It was nothingness, emptiness. As I found myself increasingly unaware of myself, I declined into a state of ignorance, and then into denial. The clutches of reality tightened around my heart, strangled it, and left it squirming on the floor, unable to resuscitate itself. I ceased to become the mold and instead became the clay, something I always vowed I would never do. And here I sit, nearly destroyed by it all. But I have discovered something that the Darkness failed to take, and could never possibly hope to destroy. I have discovered the only thing constant – change itself.
In realizing what has become of me, I must then realize what must transpire in the future to return myself to that state of being which defined my existence so long ago. I must return to the battle in full armor, ready to fight. But this means that many dangers await me on my journey. Through this adventure I must reject the very things I have come to embrace. Reality. Complacency. Normalcy. The idea that childish imagination is just that- childish. The idea that passion is the fleeting attempts of insecure people to grasp the meaning in their own lives. I must, instead, rediscover that meaning, and employ it, without reservation or purpose of evasion. I must tackle the challenges I have created for myself headlong, and ceaselessly hack through these twisted barriers I have constructed. In doing this I hope to regain all I have lost, and, if my soul can handle it all, become something better, something new, and something great. I can no longer be trapped by the bonds of humans, but instead embrace the diversity of humanity. For humanity isn’t defined by the tasks you accomplish, or the views of those around you, but the condition of the soul. A condition which is so fragile, and so quiet, that a mere whisper can blow it away. In my case, it was a long exhalation of a tempest which swept all that I knew of myself away. It left me ignorant. It left me empty. But not anymore.
It is time to retake the battleground that I have given up to the Darkness – the Darkness of routine. With God at my side, as my armor, as my sword and shield, I can overtake the things which coaxed me into this state of defeat. But God alone cannot be my excuse. I must reach into the depths of my very soul to retrieve the tattered remains of what once was, and make it what will be forevermore. In this, my greatest Battle, I will achieve what for all of my life I have desperately, yet unknowingly yearned.
En Guarde, Darkness. Thy time hath come.