When There's So Much Light, Why Do I Feel So Dark?

And it's like the world is swimming around me, crawling beneath my skin like maggots, eating the flesh so dead and so unclean and my skin sags until it eventually melts off entirely and I am lifeless, nothing but the framework of what used to be an empire. So many things that I'm so desperately sorry for but I was right from the beginning and I hate to say I told you so, but I was right, our worlds could never mix and they never will. I come from a world of shadows, built in darkness so that you can have your light, so that you can enjoy your sunshine. Someone has to be the other end of the scale and that's where we stand, in the shadows, in the rain in the middle of the roads, that's where we stand, as one, united in a way that you only wish you could be.

You've never known the bonds of brotherhood so strong that you can't breathe until you know they're alright, you've never known the confusion and the numbness you feel when there is so much blood and not all of it is your's but you don't care, you can't feel a thing. You've never known the agony of watching the atrocity of a murder, what's more, the murder victim being someone so near and dear to your heart you called him brother. I have witnessed and committed things that even your worst nightmares can't do justice to.

Do you know who I am? Do you see my shadow on your walls at nights, watching over you, trying to make sure you're alright? Can you hear your name on my lips as I barrel down the streets, my shoes making a sick slapping noise on the wet sidewalk, trying ever harder to get away from you and closer to you at the same time? Can you see the paradox I'm in, being torn apart and twisted in a sick cacophony of bone on bone and the scream of steel and wet muscle? Can you feel the regret, washing over you, emanating from me and my dissociative behavior disorders rippling across the waves and the winds to bring you the salty sweet smell of my unshed tears and wishing you were here, and wishing you understood because maybe, maybe if someone from your world of light understood someone from my world of dark we could bridge the gap and create a world of grays so beautiful and so wonderful that eventually it becomes a world of whites...

My fingertips so close to redemption, so close to wrapping around that ball of hope and being lifted out of the mires of misunderstanding and harsh words, but it's too far, just too far out of my grasp and I plummet back, watching your beautiful eyes so full of confusion and hurt and anger at being betrayed and I wish you could understand that this isn't my fault, that this is my fault for making so many promises to you but they were promises I could never possibly fulfill and how is that my fault? I can feel myself bursting from my chest, skin slick with sweat and scratched and welted from my shattered rib cage, concussive force meant to dwarf your memories of who I used to be and who you thought I was. Let me go quietly back into my shadows.

I'm sorry for ever bothering you. Forget I exist.