My Dark Places

III

STONER

You were a ghost. I found you in shadows and reached out to you in terrible ways. You didn’t censure me. You withstood my assaults and let me punish myself.

You made me. You formed me. You gave me a ghostly presence to brutalize. I never wondered how you haunted other people. I never questioned my sole ownership of your spirit.

I wouldn’t share my claim. I remade you perversely and sealed you off where others couldn’t touch you. I didn’t know that simple selfishness rendered all my claims invalid.

You live outside of me. You live in the buried thoughts of strangers. You live through your will to hide and dissemble. You live through your will to elude me.

I am determined to find you. I know I can’t do it alone.