There are events that have scarred me to the deepest part of my heart and soul. Then they were opened with gaping vulnerability and scarred again. No one can understand, or relate unless you've lived through the same things that I have. I hope no one has. Every time I think the tissue has been sealed up and I can let it go for the last time, something new bring up the past like a recurring night mare that can indeed hurt me. Maybe not physically, maybe not in the same ways as before, but the pain is always acute and piercing straight to my core. There it resides, like the Kraken waiting for it's next ship to stray into its path. Patient and calculating, then attacking when the sailors least expect it. No matter what they do to stab, shoot, harpoon, even just to injure the monster enough to escape it's to no avail. The scarring opens, the pain refreshes and I go under. Sinking like the wayward ship, lost in the clutches of my own Kraken. It shows no mercy. Makes no apology. Somehow I manage to survive the attacks over and over again but it's more like a cruel game the beast plays. Darkness creeping in, suffocating me till I think "this is it. This is the savage that will drown me. I've met my match" then just as suddenly a light seeps in just enough for me to see it. I hold on to that shallow brightness like an anchor. Not pulling me down but holding my course. Staying still until the shadowy Kraken releases it's death grip enough so I can take one gasping breath after another. But it never disappears, it just retreats down, down past my soul into a murky crevice of doubt and waits. Looming ever present but in the gloomiest background so I'm not aware of it's entity. Until that behemoth strikes out once more with it's scaly tentacles armed with suction cups of discouragement and sorrow. The game continues, the war rages on me against the demon Kraken in my head. That bastard of misery and torment creating an agony in which i'm burning alive and drowning to death all at the same time.
No one that isn't me could understand the unique anguish I live through when my Kraken decides to surface. It's my own affliction to bear in this life. The scars close and the pain recedes to a dull throb. Keeping time to a heart beat that's not my own but the fiendish Kraken's. My ever present reminder that I have a dark passenger. He waits in the gloom of my deepest doubts. Waiting.
