I know it to be true,

It has consumed me before-

It ate away at my life, my soul, my heart.

It backed me into a dark, damp corner,

It trapped me in an unforgiving web-

Sinisterly spun from the tears of sorrow and anger.

Wrapped around me in a relentless cocoon of self pity.

Until love tried to get me free.

Then I was fighting with tired limbs against a battalion of envious monsters,

Trying to keep my head above a rising sea of pain,

Running down a tunnel built from my bottled up lies,

Climbing a mountain birthed from the festering hatred in my heart.

At the summit I was crawling blind in a hill of sand,

Searching for the grain of bad feelings in a pile of truth.

Night turned into endless nights on the top of that mountain.

Calm turned to frustration.

As I was just about to give up-

As I was just about to lay my head in the sand-

To wait for the land to swallow me whole-

I found it.

That one surviving ember in the river of coal.

Still smoking and growing, cursing and crying, screaming and pleading.

I picked it up,

Kissed it goodbye,

And it rose up as smoke into the unknown,

Its essence twisting away in a torrent of sparks falling upon my skin,

Until I heard those snarled deceptions no more.

And I opened my eyes-

Battered and exhausted,

Bloody and broken,

Suffocated, crushed, drowned, and burnt.

Beaten within an inch of my life.

But alive.

Alive and finally able to see.