You broke in without permission.
I locked the gates. Checked twice. Three times. But you are here nonetheless. In my vineyard. Between the rows I have cultivated for years – carefully, silently, without a single wasted movement.
Now – trampled. Torn earth. Broken vines. The sap flows like something alive.
You don’t even eat – you shred.
Tell me, why do you need this? Isn’t it enough just to exist? Why must you crawl inside, under the skin, between thoughts, into the places I am afraid to enter myself?
You have made me a raw nerve. Any touch – and I flinch. Any sound – and I am already gone. I am not in control of myself. Is this your doing?
You devour my time. Gnaw at it from within. I sit down to work – and I fall into you. Into these endless loops. Where it is always the same. Where I think until exhaustion, but never bring anything to an end.
Logic? You dismantled it. It lies nearby – a heap of dead iron that holds nothing together anymore. I look at things and I cannot put them back. You twist everything.
…
Sleep.
You steal it most cruelly.
I lie down – and you are already there. Lying beside me. Not touching, but pressing. There is no sanctuary even in the dark. You are there too. Dictating images I never asked for. Playing out scenes I do not want. Again and again.
Why do you need so much of my blood?
You are never satiated. You only grow larger. Hungrier. You take and take, as if I were a bottomless well. But I am not. I am running out. Do you hear?
Will you ever leave? Just get out. Exit. Close the door behind you. Let me return to the silence, to level ground, to steady breathing?
Or is the plan to erase me?
…
I walk between the rows. I look at the tracks. At what is torn. At what was ordered just yesterday.
And suddenly, I catch myself knowing these movements.
These bites. This way of breaking.
I know how you got in.
Because I opened it.
Because I let you in.
Because these are my hands tearing the vines.
You did not come from outside.
You grew from within.
You are not eating me.
You are eating through me.
…
So which one of us must go?
You?
Or the one standing now amidst the ruins, unable to tell her own teeth from yours?