Brutal Desire

One step forward, two steps backward. 

***

Disconcerted and perturbed, I ponder the unfathomable yet alluring possibility of going back. Just leaving everything as it is and running for my life. Running back home. Back to where I belong. Back to the old me. But the prospect of going back only hectors me…it appears too late. Too far down the lane.

I should have known that this cloistered pathway, ill-advised as could be, was meant to unravel an undesirable fate.  It has always been an abandoned one-way street; a menacing dead-end.

There’s no turning point, no turning back now. You can’t even fast forward the misery and sprint to the finish line. Can’t gulp down the medicine in one go with eyes shut tight like there’s no tomorrow. Essentially, there is no tomorrow, not a tomorrow I’d want to live to see anyway.

Each step I take only lands me closer to a brutal desire. The spell you cast galvanised me into bracing myself for being with you at the expense of everything I had accumulated over time. Everything that was mine. My family, my friends…myself. 

Each step symbolises one more thing I sacrificed. One more thing I had to toss away and dump like it was never mine, like it never mattered. But it did. Everything I overlooked for the fleeting fulfilment of this sick desire was far less trivial than my longing for you; a mere ego-driven goal I wanted to reassure myself I could accomplish.

After all this, here I am at crossroads, halfway down the lane to destruction. Now, halfway through my journey to you, an impulsive and shallow yearning, I’m least concerned with fulfilling any desire, any wish, any goal. I’ve caused myself enough destruction already. I want to go back.

But I can’t seem to go the other way. Each step I take only bounces back.

One step forward, two steps backward. 

Trapped with absolutely no sign of escape, I surmise that perhaps this is how stories of people like me unfold.