My Family's Patron Demon

My latest fantasy involves terrorizing someone who hurt me. I have a super power to move at an incredible speed, like Mr. Spock in that episode of Star Trek where he fixes the ship in what appears to everyone but him to be 30 seconds. To him it is a few days, if I recall.

In the fantasy, someone has hurt me, someone in real life who threw me away as a friend and lover. We live in the same collective house and I speed up really fast and cut them with a short, sharp knife on the arm. It is so fast that the cut appears, they don't feel it at all. It frightens them but seems inconsequential until they notice within a few hours that "coward" has been carved into their arm. They begin having cuts on their face, one on each cheek and they're looking at a wall as a demon's face is painted in their own blood, emerging from the drywall and changing shape. This is my high-speed work of art, to manifest their terror and I'm waiting to fall asleep, the fantasy image terrifies me. In the waking dream, the person screams and I run in from the other room, in real time, coward's time.

I look at the wall and know exactly what to do. I grab a bucket of paint and put a large, un-Christian cross over it in white. I hold them and explain that it's my family demon. I tell them it has followed us for generations and forces us to face things directly or it terrorizes us. Then I show them scars on my body, my actual scars from things as mundane as bashing my head on a shelf when I was dodging a tennis ball thrown at me, cutting my arm on a really sharp blade that had been left in my bed by a childhood friend, from a dog that had jumped on me and sliced my thigh open accidentally with a jagged claw.

I tell them that when someone has acted toward me out of cowardice, the demon is attracted to them and terrorizes them until it kills them, unless they face their fears and act "bravely." This forces the person to face me, to tell me honestly what happened and what is happening.

In my version of fantasy and reality, "bravery" is non-avoidance. The Patron Demon may be a precursor to sleep or a dark groggy jaunt taken just after waking in a bed I don't want to get out of, but the dreams I have of late involve me trying to talk with people who I have hurt and who have hurt me. I carry a guilt for them and I secretly hope that every day I will receive an email or communication that is an acknowledgment that I have tried to apologize to them for the way that I wronged them. Beyond that, they will tell me that it wasn't entirely my fault, as I know none of my trespasses have been entirely my fault but the sheer silence of those who I have tried to come to resolution with seems to solidify their blame of me.

I have talked with some people I've hurt and have become good friends with them again, though my motivation to talk was for them to not believe that I thought of them in a way that is untrue, not necessarily for maintaining friendship. Some people have hurt me though I never wronged them, but I carry guilt for them as well because they believed, with no other evidence of my trespasses, that I would wrong them. I have even, in some way, apologized to them and have received that same blatant silence that stirs up my dreams.

We can always talk, though I am not pleading. I think it would be better for us, all of us, to work it out, to bore (in tedium and as a drill) each other with our ramblings of pride and ego, hurt and guilt and other tools than for us to let each other come to our own inaccurate conclusions. We can transcend our hurts the way children do. We can try not to do it again .