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I wore that insipid rejection like a dark blue cloak above my swollen shoulders that night, much like snow clings to the neck of tree barks in the dead of winter. The light of life was spinning at the back of my skull; and I knew I was drifting softly in the hugs of this ravenous blackness that sleeps in me since I was born.

How can a child be so dead hearted, they used to ask me. Now I simply let the bags under my eyes and the clawing of the raven in my head do the answering. Life fades, color by color, into the blackness of this place. A place my creator left uninhabited beneath my charcoal bones at the dawn of creation.

So that night, I went to sleep in the arms of the worm – a worm of delirium. Even though the delirious pangs have subsided, a woman sits atop my cortex. She wears an armor she made herself; of my past lovers gone wrong, of the knives hid under pillows, of the scars I took for granted and washed away in my river of deceit. She talks to me, but what she says is too loud for me to hear. So I just follow the look in her eyes. That is what leads me to the road of self damnation.