I know where it goes amiss for me—wrong for me, turns bad for me.
Sometimes, it's just a glancing blow, sometimes a sort of prod, sometimes a hit, sometimes it hangs heavy over me like a thundercloud, sometimes it rains on me in a torrent that soaks me—drenches me.
Sometimes I wince at it, frown at it, sometimes I shy away from it as though it's an electric shock.
Sometimes I bend my head as it descends onto me, weighing down on my head, and on my shoulders and on my back sometimes.
And it can do more to me—it always has the potential to do more.
It’s a threatening beast.
And it can release that potential, sometimes.
And if it does, it can trigger something deep inside me, set off a something that lies inside me, like another me, but so foreign, a shadow, so despicable, crouching in the darkness of my innards, its knees pulled up to its chin, naked, hollow eyes, staring, gaping, smirking.
If that animal is stirred inside me—that pallid, curled up incubus—if that creature is stirred into life, and wriggles itself awake within me, and insinuates me from inside, if that then I am possessed.
And then, all of that which is me is swallowed whole by the incubus.
From inside me it sucks me into itself.
And I can't move.
I can hardly breathe.
I am inside it, that which is inside me, I am constricted inside its form, deformed by its shape as it folds around me from within.
I can’t speak.
I can hardly think.
There’s no sense to anything, as it possesses me.
I am pinioned within it, as it is within me.
I can’t respond to the world.
All I can feel is its form around me—enclosing me, constricting everything that I am.
All I can feel is the anxiety at my centre that spreads to my fingers and to my toes, and to my head, and to my soft absorbing brain, and into that which is my perceiving soul.
And so I stare out waiting.
I imagine it might pass, but no.
I need it peeling off me.
I can do nothing but wait.
I can't save myself.
I can only be saved.
I need to be released.
To again feel that I am me.
But for now, I can only be frustrated, and lost and angry as it holds me inside its body, and at the same time inside my body.
It weaves itself around me like heavy sinewy, revolting chains—the slimy, exposed sinews of a beast, the irresistible heavy weight of its deadening chains hang over me and press me down, and squeeze me in its grip.
And all I can do is wait.
To be released.
And cry for help, and hope for release, so that I am not eaten by it, or crushed by it, or lost in its wriggling, sickening identity,
