Consumption

Boiling, bitterness swells like a titanic wave inside my broken heart. I swallow harsh bile, tasting the angry acid seeping up from a churning stomach. Fists clenched, friction fermentates from my palms as my knuckles whiten with stress. I feel the tears begin to form in my tired eyes, weeks and weeks worth of trials about to let loose in a fury of crying and shrieking. I shake the salty droplets aside, refusing to bend to their weakness and defeat. My jaw aches from the grinding state it has been reduced to, violence emanating from every tooth. I stand alone on a solitary mountaintop watching a sea of roiling magma bubble and hiss at my safe isolation. It hungers to consume all that is good, all that is right in this wretched world… it threatens my now faltering serenity. There is no escape for me, no secure passage to another mountaintop, no chance to scale a lonely spruce tree for protection under its shady branches. The magma rises, so close, to unleashing hell on my Earth. I lift my arms to welcome the devil himself to walk freely among doomed mankind, to release all havoc and pain among the naïve and the innocents, indifferent to suffering. The magma breaches the ledge. I am enveloped by angry, rushing liquid crust, feeling my blackened soul writhe with blissful delight. Swallowed whole, without a fight without doubt. I welcome the darkness, the end of all internal strife. I welcome the peace of nothingness and the calm after the never-ending storm. My chains, binding me to struggle and scratch for every step toward success, are snapped like wet twigs. My feet are released from their gravitational bounds, the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders. In a single instance, I am consumed. But I am now free.