I was forcefully brought into this world by a loving mother who cared too much.

She’d often say: It’ll be simple, you’ll see!

But I see to no avail, of this simplicity you speak of, and to even dream of acquiring it would be sin. For it is to wish, for a mind as nimble, as a trampled flower; and I was never quite green. So I drifted, I fought, along exquisite smiles of joy that people I never sincerely knew wore upon their faces.

“Change is good.” My teacher had always chanted to the classroom filled with curious peers, forced to live inside, to rot behind bars they cannot see either. I would nod and repeat, words of a sheep: change is good.

Yet over the time that I've left behind, trampled and killed under the sticky soles of my shoes, there has been no justice or redemption; only mild transformations over pains so light. They cling to your stiff and tired shoulders, until you are stalked by noises so discrete and ravaged by ever-growing stillness, blinking stoplights; a narrow alleyway at the peak of midnight.

Yes, I lived the dream, you could say I saw it all; however, life does not resume itself to merely viewing things for pleasure. If we do not take the time to observe the scenery instead of passing it by, we will never learn.

I tried to pray. The first God ordered me to get down on my knees, submit without question. As I spoke to him of tainted troubles, worries that would not pass, my silence rung louder, and yapped in my ears. That I am weak, that I am falling, it said. And I couldn’t remember, words that hid behind my lips. I was losing myself, to these echoes of the wilderness that spawned until they could grow no more. With an aching itch glued to the back of my skull, greedy fingers that tumbled unto all the wrong havens, I left that place; forevermore.

The second claimed it was money, and only that which could cleanse me. So I worked, I ran, across alien fields, holding foreign objects; artefacts closer to a sky I was forbidden to enter rather than a savior. It was noisy, it was crimson and vague, and I noticed a black thing within each of them. Sometimes it grew. At times it shrank. It was never there, but it was always here. And now there is a black thing within me, and it will not leave. It is stalking me, and I fear it, even if it is my own; I cannot accept it as so. It has no eyes, no openings or soul; it is just here, to devour me whole.

Without their permission, I abandoned my post. It was a goodbye to the blurry faces and unrecognizable screams, as I took with me in my blood now spoiled, a glint of faded dreams, of oceans and friends, that had not yet been struck by this fatal disease.

The final God, I discovered at the age of thirty-three. She had no fancy words to mumble, nor riches or jewels from other lands. But this being was unsullied, chaste and clean, and on the other side of the cage I had thrown myself in, she extended her hand and said: “Come.”

I barely remembered how to walk. So she held up my knees that buckled, as those of a new-born lamb would, and I made it to the other side of the street. Finally, I thought: a new door has been opened. Finally, I can move again.

Those vivid concepts obsessed me. It was wood to the fire that sparked this new devotion. I found myself unable to talk at times. So she kissed my mouth twice and held my dirty palms, becoming my senses, my voice; my salvation at once.

But soon, I bloomed anew, into someone else.

And, she did not like me anymore.

My God took a gun and pointed it towards the floor, as I opened the golden knob to find her lying on lovely violet sheets, amongst foreign shadows that were not mine. I couldn’t blame her, as she quickly shouted three words I cannot recall. She walked out of a now closed door, and I could only wonder: Why is it that I hadn't changed along with her.

I took my faults, my weighty luggage, departing with nothing left but a fleeting feeling of emptiness. Tired and sick, I ran from the memory of two unknown bodies packed on top of another.