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II. Trauma-Induced Affection is the Gist of Their Sinister Amusements

The shackles itch. The mask itches. Ineffable wisps of pure love and undying sentiment occupy the sensory deprivation of my forgotten life and I am becoming as blind as Milton or Homer as they recorded the pulsations of the universe and its ungainly beatitudes, as all-seeing as Hildegard of Bingen as she cast her gaze to the mountain's summit and glimpsed the angel in her cloak of eyes, bathed in a music so serene one could scarcely resist, upon hearing, curling up and backpacking forever through the lucid flora of dreaming's unmarred continent. My eyes stave off, as best they can, the atrophy of my worldly failure. Buried alive for one year. Valentine's Day, that humiliating heartbreak of a holiday, was the anniversary, the S.S.S.S.S.S.* must surely have marked their calendars with a crudely etched heart, using my own blood if those weekly drawings were any indication. A month ago, after countless pleadings, they let me take my mask off for a precious afternoon in the dark, my face's chapped skin soaking up the uncirculated oxygen through dried sweat like a piece of stale bread dipped in wine. The secret identity long since compromised, what was a mask, a face stripped of its vitality and baby fat, polka-dotted underwear, a social security card, bank statements (obtained through their nefarious agents at the Chase Manhattan Usury), when the true secret still lies buried deep within, in another type of darkness, the one place they cannot invade with their sterile syringes and  rubber gloves?



*Secular Society of Self-Satisfied Satan Sympathizers