Window Bars And Crowbars

A little sunlight filters through the overwhelming amount of dust that coats the glass of the solitary window pane, throwing the room in a dismal gloom. My eyes have only ever known this murky, pale yellow colour as sunlight. After the sun, there's never any light left in the world. After the sun, I only have the sounds of my laboured breathing and the heavy footfalls of my lurking demons to keep me company. When my demons show themselves, I hold onto the bars on my window and will the sun into rising.

My demons always come with a crowbar. They growl at me, taunt me with that. They give me an opportunity to escape, to use the crowbar and pry open the bars that I have come to love so. But beyond the old, brittle glass, a plunge to death awaits.

I am no Icarus. I do not hope to fly. I would be willing to fall to my own death to avoid the fate that befalls me every sundown. But I have fallen for the murky sunlight, a love more tainted, more tinted than Icarus'. As I turn down their mocking offers each night, I know that destiny has already set out in a chariot of steel and is on its way to wreck me.

Every time I refuse the crowbar less hesitantly than the night before, I know that I have fallen for the very fetters that shackle me to my nightmares.

This world is a strange place. Stranger still, are its inhabitants. Over the centuries, we have evolved; we have learnt to emote in evasive ways to hide our real emotions; we have crafted our words into a defence mechanism; we have fallen prey to our own whims, creatures of the dark born from our own dreams. We have learnt to put up shows for the world, only to return to the monsters that plague us every night, the monsters that gift us torment, the monsters that we strive so hard to protect from everyone else's eyes, the monsters that we don't really know how to banish, monsters that are spawned every time we falter in our steps.

We are, in no way, different from the soul that has unwittingly fallen for the very thing that kills her. We have a unique bond with our own fatal flaws. Those fatal flaws are our very own metaphorical window bars. The lurking monsters, the very reminder of the number of times our fatal flaws nearly killed us. What we fail to realise is that the crowbar is the lesson that each one of our mistakes comes with. The very realisation of those lessons becomes our salvation. But, if we fail to grab the crowbar every time the monsters appear with them, we slip deeper into the vicious cycle of

slip-up-->mistake-->recuperate-->slip-up.

The thing that's got to change is our perception. The mistakes that we make are not the very end of us and they hold nothing over us. We just need to break free of our innate tendency of committing the same mistake over and over again.

We hold the keys to the both the doors, the Door to Eternal Damnation, and the Door to Salvation, in our hands. Our fate is our own to write. Our demons are our own to fight. Our fears are our own to overcome. Our mistakes are our own to learn from. Our will is our own to strengthen. Our life is our own to change.

Our window bars are our own to break.