Shadows

[Mike Church]

All my life I have been hauanted by shadows.

They are in my sub conscious and my dreams.

I push them away but they are never far away.

They speak to me and cannot avoid hearing them.

One is a little boy who has been whipped and beaten so much he has learned to enjoy it as getting attention.

One is a little boy with no friends

One is a teenager with a lot of anger and who likes to beat others into being his friend.

One is a teenager who is sexually assaulted and feels wanted once again and learns to like the sex along with the violence

One is a teenager who sells himself for attention and for what he is addicted to

One is a young man seeking to live normally

One is a young man who falls deeply in love

One is a man who continually re-enacts his past to get attention from other men

One is an alcoholic who cries for help

One is a man who hides his body under mounds of fat or is so skinny that people were afraid of him

One is an older man who seeks healing and a magic bullet

One is an older man who keeps on trying to heal with the help of others.

One is an older man who tries desperately to keep away the shadows because to believe them will bring defeat.

These are my shadows and they are always with me. I no longer try to ignore them but I recognize them for what they are. Nothing. Because they are not me.

I am no longer a shadow to myself. I still have the urges and the whispers from all these shadows but with the help here and my own determination I will not fall under their spell.

They are as vicious and those who used me. In a way they used me too. I thought I needed them and their whispered lies dragging me further into the pit of hell. No more.

John Paul Jones: Surrender Sir! I have just begun to fight!

 

[mrsunshineguy]

Hi Mike Church,

Thanks, that was sort of nice.

I remember the shadows.

I used to see them stalking from the corner of my eye, usually during nightmare season. Those were the nights I knew to stay awake . . . or at least sleep somewhere odd where the nightmares would not know to find me . . .

Now I see shadows different. My favorite are when I take my hands and make wall and ceiling shadows for my baby girl. Her favorite is just a simple hand spider on the ceiling that gets bigger and bigger (moving closer to the light bulb) until the ceiling is covered, and the legs start down the walls.

Her eyes get big, she smiles, and she just laughs and laughs. At one-year-old she seems smarter than I did in my twenties and thirties.

My shadows are just of me, I guess you, too?. Happy me has happy, fun shadows, Dark, scary me had dark, scary shadows.

See you,

Sunshine