I used to believe the way I felt was
it.

There was nothing more to me.
I was cracking and the world around me fell away, before I learned how to travel,
I was lost.

My mind was fragmented and skipping through eternity. Some days I'd wake up a new age. Reliving days I didn't even remember.

For longer than I'd like to admit,
I believed these were dreams.

That my brain was throwing me from nightmare to nightmare,
Just trying to wake me up.

I only fell deeper though,
deeper into the faded moments from the past.

Once I learned,
once I realized these were
parts
of me.

I found myself...not lost...but

wandering

from one beautiful daydream to the next.
My world's were no longer stories and fantasy lands. They became my past, I used my pen to tear open holes in time, to relive the things I'd rather forget.

I felt strong.

The demons that haunted those placid corridors in my brain,
they didn't have power.

The fear I felt was real,
Living in it was easier when you knew you could leave. So I traveled from dream to memory, polluting my timeline with my anachronistic presence.

It wasn't long before writing felt like nothing and the only thing that mattered were the spaces in between this reality and the past.

Poems were the maps I drew.
Each an outline of the steps I should take when I open a rift into my memories again.

At some point though,
I could see those ghosts in my timeline.

I spent so much energy in other realities,
they began to bleed into mine. Just like I was
intruding
On things that were,

They were now existing in places that are.

The only real way to be rid of them was
to stop all together.

To force reality to put it's pieces back by forgetting.
So I killed the old me and threw him back into my notebook.

I sealed that gateway with fire and

stopped opening doorways to demons.

They still creep in sometimes though.
I imagine that's
the problem with interdimensional travel.