Bastion

The first time I had exposed my soul to a page was immediately following the rejection from a girl I asked out in high school.

I opened the portcullis of my fortress to her, only to be told I couldn’t be her king and I wouldn’t be her knight either. She did however entertain court jester.

I found myself picking pieces of my heart off the cobblestone courtyard after she had catapulted my towers with repudiation—my perimeter crumbling on all fronts.

Emotionally overtaken,

my ego was decapitated in one abrupt swing. Its head brutally affixed to a one-hundred-foot stake for the rest of the world to see, thwarting off any approaching attackers, and making a mockery of a young man’s try at love.

I used the spilled blood gushing out of me, to build a moat around my kingdom, filled it with alligators and leaches, then sewed my scars onto banners to be hung as heraldry on its exterior walls.

I plastered her image into the joints when I rebuilt it, as I knew it would harden stronger than any mortar by itself, and then withdrew my bridge to dissuade any visitors for years to come.

The only road map leading back to the kingdom was drawn in a notebook, lost on a single page, and signed by its cartographer with an invisible tear at the bottom—Left in a cold, dark dungeon below its city streets with no key to enter, and no candle to illuminate the paper.

The words broke through my doors, took my spirit hostage, ripped it out of me at sharpened pen-point, then tortured me by forcing me to write it out, until I heeled.

Then I healed.