Purgatory

The stagnant air hovers about my body like dust on a corpse, only magnified by the bitter chill of His presence. It is He who brought me to this state. The grim reaper of joy; the bearer of cruelty. Nothing surpasses the vortex that is his empty soul. He is translucently opaque. Gritting his icicle teeth in my ear, he whispers1

“Do you fear me child?”2

“No.” His voice is deep and frigid. Just close enough to deadly to stir my trepidation.3

“Then why are you shaking, my love?”4

I pause at the sickening tenderness in his voice, glancing at my hands as traitors, my heart seizing and constricting within my throat. Raven hair frames the face of emptiness. I know it all too well.5

“Have you not missed me then,” he smiles. My lips painfully return the gesture. “You are not worthy.” 6

Is anyone? He wrings his frostbitten hands as he paces around my chair. Far be it from him to forget that I am immobilized. That is to say, his presence has weighted my being. 7

The hawk-eyed figure twirls his bony fingers around my hair, tickling my paling cheeks with discolored fingernails. “Not long has it been. Too many reasons you have for my visits to your desolate reverie.”8

“Yet you feel the need to seduce me.”9

He does not cringe at the spit on his shirt. “Your odium is as fake as your courage, my dear.”10

His beady eyes bleed black into my icy blues. With a glance the tug of war begins. Servant versus master. The roles clear yet faded.11

He breathes in my vanilla perfume, inhaling with it the few remains of my energy. “Bleed and you feel me,” he seduces. “Love and you hate me. Cry and you shake with the power, which is my comforting embrace. You and I are one, my child. You and I are whole.”12

“You and I are nothing!” 13

“Is that the lie you prefer?” He breathes deeply as though dragging in a cigarette. “I know a thing or two about lies. No one, I’m sure, knows them as well as you though, my dear.”14

His gaunt shadow follows my eyes onto the wall. All is vacant, but him and I. Though vacancy in itself is a concept to be argued. His skeletal hands clutch heavily onto my shoulders. How perfectly aware he is of his affects on my weary heart.15

“You were tired and I carried you. You were hungry and I fed you. Lost and I found you. Naked and I clothed you.”16

“You killed me!” I scream, voice fading to the floor. 17

His languid tone never wavers from a whisper. “Perhaps…but I revived you.”18

“Perhaps…but you-”19

The phrase remains idle on my tender lips, only to find that the Pain had finally vanished.20