The beast
You’re not looking under bushes, checking around corners, you don’t expect it, especially when you try your best to live by the rules, eat the right things and pray everyday. You read about it in the newspapers, hear about some poor soul on the news, you empathise for a moment never believing you could be next headline. I didn’t hear it coming, I feared it, but with no sense of reality or understanding. It wasn’t a rainy day, it wasn’t a Friday 13th, I hadn’t broken any mirrors.
Then suddenly it rips into you, its jaws tearing though, its claws gripping in so tight, pulling away is impossible and will bring even more pain. All you can do is curl up into a ball, in some vain attempt to protect yourself, it doesn’t work, its stronger than you. People look on, as the feral uncontrollable beast mutilates the very person you thought you were. Others want to help, but they are powerless. You will never return to who you were, never be the same.
Hours, days and weeks pass by. Just as you think you can uncurl you can unwrap yourself, your bitten and mauled again. The beast is familiar, old scarred wounds reopened and the shock you felt during that first attack no longer dulls the mind, it is now real, deeply painful and part of the new life. The beast is always there, you do you’re best to chain it, to muzzle the rabid mouth full of teeth. You occasionally let it off the leash, that you have, after so much time managed to bring some control with, but not in public, that would never do, no-one wants to see that kind of pain. But you have to give it freedom, at times, otherwise surely the beast will build into something again that cuts into every part of you and you cannot contain. Its almost your pet, ever present and sometimes submissive. The beast even has a name now, we call it grief.
