Different Night

He still couldn't shake the previous night's dream. The dark twisted figures were lodged in his mind. The faces from the bar back at him. Probing and silently asking for a reason. They haunted his sleep. They would not allow him to rest his mind. The asking for forgiveness, something he could not give, dogged him every moment.

He did not mean for them to be angry. In fact he didn't even know they existed. But yet here they were. Again. He could not deny their being real at this point. Sleep came to him in fits and smoldering embers of memory. The burning of their stares stole the blood from his heart and made his soul a twisted charred remnant of what it once was.

Demons of his conscious crept in and attacked him. They came at night, when he was alone, as always. He fought them off, talon and wing beating him down. Each time it was more and more of a challenge to keep them away from him. But he always managed to survive. But the imps took a little piece of him every time they left.

He hoped he took a part of them as well.

The night finally passed. His victory would be short-lived. The daylight would give reason to his existence, as the night took all reason from it. Over the decades of this battle, he had grown accustomed to it. Some nights he would beat back the demons and some nights they would grind him into submission. It was the losses, the twilight where the beasts were victorious, that he feared. Without exception the day following a beating would be nothing but blackness and pain.

Some days the darkness would finally fade and he would be cut to ribbons, or in a strange town. Other times he would be unharmed and in the exact place he fell the night before. Never did he retain a single memory of what transpired while under the demons' influence.

The shrinks could not help him. The gurus and priests offered no relief either. Drugs and sleeping pills only gave the demons a night without fight. This was a war fought on the terror's terms. He accepted this by now and had shed any glimmer of hope to an end of the torment.

The sun cast its rays over his body like a shroud of safety. Something new ran across his mind. "I could take the fight to them," he thought. He wrapped his arms around his naked body and embraced the warmth.