So I had lived only to breathe the tepid air around me.

Oh, even if dry and polluted, stood stale and faint smelling, I enjoyed the haze I had fallen in.

It was too easy to fall in love.

It was always too easy to believe in the good traits that someone has rather than to dig deep enough to see that they are nothing of what you truly expect them to be.

When you create such a delusion within yourself, it may stem and grow throughout your ages into several towering limbs, adjoined to a fearsome and gnarled wretched plant. A tree that deserved to have fallen for as many centuries as it had lived, from the moment its filthy seed germinated beneath the fertile soil of a tainted earth. The path which should not have grown anything but had in spite of that which bade it to do so.

My hand placed its palm across the heavy wood. Wrinkled like the curves in a desert sand only deeper in color, and seemingly ashamed of its own skin, grew twisted upon its surface as if trying to hide within itself rather than from I who had trespassed the sanction of mist.

My fingers trailed lightly over its weathered trunk scratching my nails along its bark slowly. Enough to make it even bleed just a little.

Clear amber flowing liquid rolled across the side of my finger and began to change its path to circle down the back of my hand. As it glistened in the dim light from a source unknown to the thickened jungle, it seemed as if I had tortured it, writhing in an immortal dance upon my skin. And in a sense I was a little offended by the way in which it chose to travel freely upon my body.

I wanted to control it.

In my own sense, I needed the gold to flood open my veins.

My tongue fell across the salt of my skin, trailing upwards and around the drop of sun that had betrayed me by its motion undisciplined and rebellious to will.

Now, it was mine.

I felt the surge of a sickness welling from within me and dug my fingers deeper in the uncanny softened wood below them. As my eyes drew wide, even fixed upon the ground as I gasped, I glanced upward toward my hand, and realized the effects of what I could not be saved from.

What I had burrowed deeper into,

What caused my body to convulse in an animated disgust,

Coiled its way around my lungs and squeezed tighter with each passing second that the venom bit into me.

Within the confines of this wretched tree,

I had dug skin deep and tasted its divinity.

But much deeper within,

I had not cared to withdraw my denial

That inside my own creation

I had withdrawn into myself.

And before this god I fell,

Locked in a state of chaotic dreams as a comatose reality began to fade over my eyes

In the darkened woods, I struck earth. My body subdued to the ground.

My hair mingled with the dampened leaves before the deadened giant, curled into the roots of him. My trembling fingers, the last thing of connection to that world around me, a seed, plunged into the earth's veins, pulsing as my own, forced life into me.

I began to grow again beneath the soil.

And the lifeless husk above, eroding to a silted hope that wrought breath, encased in a fragile covering, becoming something which I could or could not have chosen it to become.

The very seedling

Bursting from the detriment of my corrupted heart.