The Darkness Within

By: Marc McMahon

I’m already inside you, yet you don’t realize I exist. I affect your decisions, yet you still think you make them on your own. Oh, my foolish little child. One day you too shall learn my little friend! You too shall learn. You sometimes wonder why you feel the way you do but figure it’s the flu or sickness the new season has brought. Kind of like when you had COVID last year but much worse you wait and see.

It’s not the flu, COVID, or pneumonia though it’s me, the one inside you, killing you, but you haven’t even realized it, not yet anyway.  I’m like an ominous black cloud that hovers above your life in stealth mode so you don’t even realize I am there. I sit there waiting. Dormant for years I respond to nothing. I am some people’s greatest fear and for others, I am an unlikely way out of a life they never thought they belonged in any way.

I am your personal plague with a lifetime subscription, waiting, for the mother of all opportunities. It’s well worth the wait. I mean if you want to be honest here I never much liked you anyway. Seriously I mean you are kind of cocky, you know arrogant, I would say. Another thing is you are way too fucking happy all of the time.

Another reason I can’t wait to knock that shit-eating grin off your face that’s there far too often. So Mr. Positive attitude, and all things will work together for good, the world is a better place with love in it are you starting to hear me? YES, I said, can you hear me now?

I thought that might get your attention and if that did this certainly will too. Remember when you were about 12 and your favorite grandmother became ill, terminally ill? And remember watching her go from being the strongest woman you had ever met to the 88 lb skeleton laying on your great grandma’s couch so weak she couldn’t get herself up.

Simply laying there, in horrible pain, dying. I know you’ll never forget that. How could you, you both were so close to each other. So sad, but you know what’s even sadder than that for you? The fact that your grandma’s illness and death were my work. Your face is turning awfully red my little friend is somebody mad at me? I’m thinking so. Quite professional aren’t I? I figured if nothing else you’re a writer, so I thought you might appreciate seeing the art in another artist’s work.

Sick, aren’t I?