Onslaught / Aftermath

“And in a word, he watches himself as if he were an enemy and lying in ambush.” – Epictetus, ENCHIRIDION, XLVIII

Through the cracks in the fortifications of I the invaders within lay siege to the weary wasteland of my mind, exploiting that moment of greatest impotence against their onslaught, each fire arrow more fantastic, more important than the last and more impossible to catch and to stop and there is nothing there but that which circles and circles and circles and the more I fight it the more it takes hold and I tell myself that I am not my thoughts and I tell myself and I tell myself but my thoughts have other ideas. They impale, they possess; they submerge my feet in cement and hurl me off the rickety docks into the murk and the muck and leave me without the energy to swim back to the surface until at some point, maybe seconds, maybe hours, maybe days later, a ladder of frayed rope breaks through the surface and its breeze passes across my clenched eyes and I open them and and I find, bit by bit, step by step, that I can, from some unknown somewhere, call forth the energy to climb its uncertain rungs, with bruised and battered and bleeding hands and feet encased in cement, casting off its weighty imprisonment with each step towards that path back to myself, exhausted but vigilant of the shrapnel strewn above and stepping carefully with atrophied feet as I survey the aftermath and rebuild, plugging the heretofore unseen cracks in the fortifications of myself and building new ones in preparation for the next time because the only truth is that there will be a next time: the invaders never really leave; they are always there, with me, part of me, waiting at the gates of myself with arrows at the ready; such is life, again and again, forever and ever (amen, maybe / oh, man).