#its like saying theyre going to die

It’s All In Your Mind

It’s a funny kind of fear that I trade in. More Phantom of the Opera than Silence of the Lambs, riddled with melodrama and doubt rather than anything concrete and terrifying. The idea isn’t to render you catatonic, to paralyse you, but to instead open that one door in your mind that just seethes with inky blackness. The one that you can’t help but tilt your head slightly at, thinking about all the things that might lurk beneath that undulating facade. 

It’s all theatre, and I hope that doesn’t lessen it in your mind. The thing is we’re playing with stage props and not real weapons, all the blood is just corn starch and food colouring, and the fangs are rubber. It felt real in the moment, though, right? When I came at you with that look in my eye, the psychotic words bubbling from my mouth and the latex gloves clinging tightly to my fingers. When I played the scissor blade across the underside of your breast, popped past the buttons on your blouse, and left you handcuffed to the toilet for an hour and a half wearing nothing but smeared mascara and scrawled marker. 

But we both know this is just a Haunted House, with the appropriate proper nouns. This isn’t some dark force manifested in the mind of one man, and you’re not in any real danger. Your mind is tricked into fight or flight, the appropriate endorphins and adrenaline released so that you hop on a fast ticket to that special place where you just float and smile, and I have the exquisite pleasure of watching you go there, enjoying feeling the weight of your trust sitting comfortably in my palm. It’s theatre, melodrama, a happy lie we both buy into for the duration, before we both collapse, shattered and exhausted, and the whole thing comes tumbling down with us.

Then we can hold one another, and laugh at all the fucked up shit we do. And I sometimes wonder whether that’s why we do it, for the moments after when we get to just smile at the fact that we made it to the other side.