Enemy

Sometimes, that enemy creeps in slowly, like the early morning fog. The fingers are wispy tendrils reaching for something to hold on to, but gives you a warning of its coming. You brace yourself for the gray-black curtain that slowly edges it’s way towards you knowing that it will be unpleasant when it binds you.

There’s a small hope that the enemy will be as insignificant as the opaque misty wall that slowly, quietly rolls in. In the long anxious moments of waiting, the mind will steel itself with rock walls with sand for mortar. It’s better than the flimsy plastic film that occasionally wraps it’s way around your mind. As the smoke-colored enemy vanishes, only lingering until the temperature rises, it exits quicker than it arrived.

The body is weak, but not broken.

Other times the enemy blockades you in the damp black rock walls, closely aligned, arresting you in the screaming barrier and gnashing demons that crawl behind. As you’re ill prepared without warning, you panic in the overwhelming darkness. You push against the frigid, damp, unyielding masses with all of the strength within you- at first.
Hours of fighting the solid earth, screaming, pleading, clawing, and praying. No chains hold you, they are not necessary.
Your mind bending to the enemy’s will- consuming the energy fueling the prison in which you remain. The body grows weary and numb.
Unfeeling and bleeding.
There, you escape the misery, fleetingly with numbness and cold. The images behind your eyes lend you no solace, but the mind binds itself slowly as you disconnect.

The enemy’s walls fall away- your jailer bored from the absence of fight. The escape leaves you shaking, bloody, and bruised, but you heal somehow, slower with each attack than the last.

The game the enemy plays is that of a cat toying with the mouse for its musing and entertainment.

The enemy robs you each time, painfully slow boiling of the mind’s protection, until there is nothing but emptiness left. The only way to win is death. That peaceful separation from the mind, where the spirit escapes the clutches of the enemy’s reach into the space beyond which crushes the darkness.

Until then, Death my friend, the hero that will defeat the enemy, I shall endure until you overcome.