To My Inner Demon

With the start of a new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with you. Yes, you, my once-beloved inner demon.

You’ve given me some of the most euphoric moments in my life – hope, excitement, promises for a golden future; but time and time again you’ve fallen short of your promises. And now, finally, I realise that you’re nothing but a tease.

You’ve tantalised me, dangled me over an entire ocean of hope, then callously dropped me into the feral waves, grating and shredding my soul upon rocks as sharp and sadistic as you yourself have become – ever since you crept inside me, digging and burrowing deep, deep into my inner-being, injecting me with your parasitical desires. Yet still I loved you, still I longed for you, needed you … but as I grew older, your own specious love turned into venom.

And now you’re gone. Yes, gone. Verschwindet. It’s just me now, all alone with my empty carcass of former hopes and dreams. Not knowing where to turn.

But I have to turn somewhere …

So I turn to the New Year. The new decade. 2020.

Where else is there to turn? I’d like to turn backwards if only I could, and re-do things differently. Given a Take Two on life, I wouldn’t allow you to bully and govern and intimidate me for all those long, exhausting years.

But turning backwards isn’t allowed. Not according to the laws of physics that govern this weary old planet, with so many greying, dog-eared dreams, all in desperate need of recycling.

I am not going to recycle my need of you. Neither am I going to cast you into the four oceans, already littered with so many polluted hopes and dreams.

The spell you cast upon me has finally been broken with the advent of a new decade. I shattered it into a million pieces with the passing of the old; and now all the scattered shards of your false promises are being tossed about in those dark and beguiling waves – you know, the very same waters that you dangled me over for so many, many tortuous years.

Now, at last, it’s my turn. No more demon to bully and haunt me. No more yawning, leering waves to engulf me, no more dagger-rocks to rip me apart.

You are gone. Yes you, my ungodly, unholy, iniquitous inner demon, together with all your whispered promises that never came to anything, but instead left me a disillusioned wreck. I can’t see you anymore – which is hardly surprising, because I have at last excluded you from the new year, from the new decade, from my life.

I’m sorry if my abandonment of you hurts, but the pain I’m inflicting on you now is nothing compared to the sting of venom that your long, parasitical tail and fangs spread into my bloodstream.

I have at last extracted you – segment by segment; the entire, tapering, wormy substance that was once part of my life’s blood. That was once you.
As from now, you are officially banned.

Here’s to 2020 – freedom at last!