You stand in the darkroom of your mind, the place where you linger with the memories that are buried deep. Here, you craft the world into the masterpiece you have always desired. This is where you take the shattered puzzle pieces of the life you destroyed, and rearrange them like they are clay that you can mold into anything your imagination desires. My, isn’t it nice when everything can be fixed to suit your needs?

It’s a great place for you to go, this mental sanctuary you call home. When you are there, you can live out the fantasies that are stolen from you once the real world thrusts itself upon you. It’s a place where you are master, and no one can tell you otherwise. Here, you are the one with the scalpel, chipping away at the images that lay passive at your mercy. You do this until you create the portfolio you couldn’t force in the real world. You do this to everyone you meet, tinkering with their likeness until it fits into the frame you dictate as being right. I know you are guilty of this, because I was a witness to it myself. I know you are guilty of this, because you did it to me.

When you met me, so many years so long ago, you thought the power of your observation was always right. Creating a composite of me in your mind, you were deluded into believing you mastered my soul. In this world of false intimacy, you gambled that you knew exactly how to manipulate my heart. You thought you convinced me to live out the role you decided I would play in your fantasy. After all, you decided you had the instinct, that you had the game of charm. You determined what would happen, and all I had to do was wait for you to start the play so I could perform for you, the doll of your desire created just to please you.

This is what you decided, all without ever asking me. I was supposed to dance to the tune of your desire. I was to be your toy when you decided the pain of the world thrusted upon you needed to be purged into a willing chalice, and I would be the vessel to temper your agony. You determined that I would be the one who would submit to your desperate needs. I would give you the comfort of my desire, and you would able to temper the rage of your betrayals into the sanctuary of my nakedness. You would find salvation there, a haven where you could bury your soul in secrets. Confessionals are a place to hold the sins and failings you never dare to tell in the brightness of day. You chose the temple of my body to hide the dark confidences you would only tell a stranger.

This is the alchemy you forged as the creator and puppetmaster, and I would dance like a puppet at the end of the strings you pulled. You decided it was a grand play of ideas, fit for the regality of your artistry. Just like God playing with the clay of the world, so you would play with me. You would play on the sympathies you knew you planted in me, and I would be yours eternally in the cage you created for me. I would remain in place where you could always return to me, with you believing I would be there forever. This would happen, of this anyone could be sure. After all, you certainly were.

If I return today to the grain of compassion I once offered you so long ago, this is what I can say now to you, after all the blood has been washed away by the changing tides of the ocean. I can sympathize by saying, it’s always easy to place projections on another, is it not? Although it’s just as easy to deny that those perceptions even exist, especially when you’re the one doing the projecting.

It’s easy to believe that imagination is real in all places that exist, just because it’s real in your mind. The more insistent the thought, the more real it seems. Anything contradicting it is a madness that must be purged. This is the beginning of violence, like the seed that gave birth to the rage which consumed both of us from the inside out. This is how the murkiness of obsession all begins, flirting with a happy thought in your mind. All without you even realizing it is like playing with a match near the dark beauty of glistening alcohol. It’s easy to create your own reality when the world is against you in your thoughts.

Years have gone by, yet still you place the image you created of me in a cell you can return to, again and again. Crafting my image in your perfection, you play God beyond the limits the Almighty plays here on Earth. God Himself at least gives the illusion of free will to the objects of His creation. But you go beyond even the highest divinity when you wield your will upon me in the bowels of your darkroom.

Here, the reality that is me transforms into your tool to play with, manipulating me into a graphic that pleases you. Here, you can create the girl that you always wanted. Here, you can gag me silent. Here, you can make me enjoy your whippings and punishment. You can do anything you want here in your personal cauldron, reveling in the image you create of me. Here, I play the part you set for me here. You can even pretend that I want to be the slave you create in your own mind.

But there is one thing that you can never do here, never could and never will. You can never possess me in this place. Not the way you want. You can’t have the satisfaction of capturing my heart if I’m not even there to be present for the shackles to bind me. You don’t have me with you by your side. You only have the image of me with you. Fantasy is like junk food that fills you, but makes you ravenous with hunger afterwards. It is the kind of filler that makes you obese on gluttony, but starves you with malnourishment.

I will always be tethered to you, like then, like now. I share with you a bond of violence that can never be erased. It displays scars that bleed upon the soul from time to time, a reminder that it is always there. But it is not the same as having my heart, my soul, or my body for yours to share. Shadows, ghosts, and demons litter the trail between the reality of who I am and who you are. Scattered along the years, they are blood etchings that are never truly erased. This, to be sure, is not fantasy.

So you have your darkroom of shadows, and I retell the story in a way that fills my own blanks of sorrow. We both create our own imagery, it seems. So much we have in common. In the darkness, one finds whatever bond that one can to survive. We will always have this together, deep in the dungeons where one never wants to go.

I remove the chains that bound me to you for so long. They shackled in circles around me for what you called forever, making a mockery of the ring of eternal love. But I have broken though them, walking away from the chimera that tortured me in the name of delusion.

While you remain in your darkroom, I escape from the scalpel that bled me for too long. I cut the puppetmaster’s strings that you once wielded, and I am now master of my own destiny. The light of freedom beckons in front of me, without you to imprison me with your delusions. I now walk there, sovereign in my soul, and dissolve your presence into a final farewell.