The Fire Inside Me

My body is but a vessel, for something untamed and dangerous.

A hollowed shell that appears clear, calm, and placid.

But inside, inside lurks a beast that cannot be contained.

My body is but a vessel--a fragile glass bottle cracking with each passing minute As the congealed smoke blackens its interior.

It is the fire inside me--faint whispers in the night of insecurities, fears, and passions that refuse to be killed.

A spark--a bright glimmer of utter madness constantly threatening to consume my soul.

It is infinitely powerful, and unyielding.

Try as I might, I cannot keep the monster in its cage.

With each attempt of quarantine it eats away another layer of thick iron from the metal bars of its prison cell.

Two halves of my being are constantly at war with one another, one: the calm, controlled exterior. The other: a wild, bloodthirsty beast, that appears as my worst nightmares and my greatest ambitions, the destructive force that beats my withered mold of a body to the ground and builds up my tiny frame to the height of a skyscraper.

It is the fire inside me: the inception of phoenix flame, a magical spell that went horribly wrong and now cannot be put out. The flames engulf everything they touch: they are the sweet caresses that destroy all order and faction and replace it with chaos, disorder, and vibrancy. I don’t know whether to call them waking nightmares or daydreams, but all the time, I experience visions--vivid and defined, of the catastrophic possibilities should the fire ever be unleashed.

I picture myself clutching my head and screaming in a dark room as it violently erupts into flames; they appear as the eerie premonitions and memories of a timeline that never occurred or one that has yet to.

I picture myself with the ability to disintegrate the universe just because I want to, as if all my innermost emotions, passions, and convictions had power as though they were matter, as if though they had mass.

I am afraid. So utterly terrified of what I can do. If I were ever to unleash the beast what horrors could it inflict upon the world? What unseen madness could it unwind, wrapping itself around each living being like a suffocating python and bending it to its will--TO MINE?

Who is master? I or the beast? Though I keep it, as safely as I can, guarded under lock and key, I am ultimately slave to its desires. Should I fail to appease it, it would devour me.

I fear the beast in all its ugliness, as well as in all its beauty. I have a wonderous fantasy in which I never have to unleash or suppress the monster, but wield it in all its glory. In that version of impossible reality the beast and I are equals, neither one master nor slave to the other.

If I could only control it, my capabilities would be limitless.

If I could only wield it I could achieve something near apotheosis. I could be GOD.

The fire inside me carries with it celestial power.

Or that of a legion of demons.

With every passing hour the glass bottle that is my fragile excuse of a home for a human soul earns another crack in its thin matrix.

Another sliver of light to the outside world,

Another air-hole for the monster to aspirate from and long still more hungrily for escape. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be harnessed.

It can only be guided.

The fire inside me gives me power to do marvelous, great, and terrible things. The power to achieve great successes or commit morbid atrocities. The only thing that can possibly hope to control it is a single voice--a voice like a whisper, that speaks from the fine white ashes accumulated at the bottom of a mind gone horribly awry, but it is there.

“Truth,” it says. “--Or lies.”

“Which will the fire nourish? Which will the fire destroy?”

The fire inside me is ready to burst. It is ready to unleash infernal chaos in every facet of my being it comes to contact with. And yet, it waits. It waits for me to decide.

So I open my mouth and issue a simple command.