You think I live under your bed, but you’re wrong. As you get older, I creep from lying under your bed to screaming inside your head. You can’t judge me because we’re all hiding something; from the time you wake up and look in the mirror to put on your mask. You work hard to keep up this façade, but I work harder. I work hard every day, trying to escape. Every human spends a night or two on the dark side and regrets it. But I only exist on the dark side. You can wake up and escape your fears. But my whole life is a nightmare and I don’t know how to wake up. “I’m only human,” you tell yourself, and all is forgiven. But what if a cruel twist made you something else, something monstrous? Who forgives you then? I just want the same thing you do: a chance at life. We’re not so different in that way. But when you’re a monster, the consequences in life are worse. I find myself in an eternal nowhere, between being a monster and trying to act human. Some of us accept what they are and take advantage of it, but others, others live in denial. This denial leaves me with the most important question of my existence. Do I embrace who I am, or refuse it? And which one is the real curse? One thing we have in common is that we’re both capable of destruction; but the difference is you feel remorse for what you’ve done. You want to repair the damage with a quick fix, but you can’t put a band aid on what I’ve done. Because some doors can’t be closed once they’re opened. Most people can cover up their true feelings and pretend to be something they’re not, but I don’t have a choice. You can sleep as an escape. Close your eyes and forget who is screaming inside your head. I don’t get a break. Sleep is no escape for me; it’s only a nest where fresh nightmares hatch. So how do you escape when your life is the nightmare? If you hate what you are, you’ll do anything to deny it. You’ll feed the lie until it grows and takes over reality. But who you are waits for you in the darkness of your mind; it waits for you to slip up so it can take over once again. I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin, and every time he knocks I can’t help but let him in. And fighting that urge is the hardest part. I secretly hope that the monster inside me is actually inside us all. If you look hard enough, you’ll see it. We will all be seen. We all have demons; some choose to feed theirs and some don’t. They live inside us all, and when we feed them, they win. But those who starve their monsters create something even worse than what they were before. You get angry and irritable when your hunger is unbearable. Just imagine how worse I am when I’m hungry. The more you starve me, the more intense my desire to take over becomes. Everything you’re running from lives inside your head, and you’ve made me hungry. I may be hungry but I am by no means weak. I become angrier every single day; building this anger and getting stronger to take you on. You’ve got a war in your mind and guess who’s going to win. So you better start running because here I come. But after all, how can you run from something that’s inside you? You are your own worst enemy, and until you realize that, you’ll continue making this world your own personal hell trying to fight me. “We stopped checking for monsters under our beds when we realized the real ones were inside us.” We don’t live in the darkness of your room; we live in the darkness of your mind, clawing and reaching for the light. Because even monsters are afraid of the dark, but the sun will always rise again. How do you destroy the monster inside without becoming a monster yourself? And what if the monster stopped acting like a monster? Is it no longer a monster? Should you still fight it? But at the end of the day, the only thing anyone wants is to feel good, so you feed me instead of fighting me for your own selfish relief. You feed me so you don’t have to run from me because you know I’ll always be faster. But when you feed me so much that I take over and you begin slipping farther and farther away, how do you run from yourself? How do you fight me when I don’t feel pain or guilt or sorrow? All I feel is hunger and you’ve starved me for too long.