Sometimes you reach a crossroad in your life where a decision has to be made. 

It’s a decision that affects your life and those around you forever.

It’s a time where you have to sit on the curb and really look into the looking glass of your mind and reflect on everything that has come before—the words spoken in haste, accusations, false promises, and tears mirrored by the beauty of love and laughter.

You must place every emotion, with a heavy heart, on the scales before you to see which way they will tip. She is already in Olympus, weighing and measuring you from above the clouds.

Every external factor will be pushing and pulling you; grabbing hands will be reaching for all they can, trying to pull you in their direction for personal gratification. Your skin will rip as you bleed a river of claret tears upon the cold, hard floor known as truth.

The laughter of children can be heard in the distance, followed by the crying heart of the broken in another. You struggle to look down the roads in front of you—to see which contains each haunting sound. The melodies of laughter will be echoing in the air, dancing like a single ballerina on chords of beautiful notes. The crying is a shuddering reminder of your own failings, burning you like an imposter in your thoughts that sting you to your core.

Who has a right to play God in a child’s life? I certainly didn’t at the time and the choices made reflected this—reflected the right path taken.

You try to decipher each word that plays through your mind, encrypted letters slowly revealing their real meanings. You feel sick and used, like an emotional toy that’s been played with.

Manipulation is a cruel game that can cause untold pains as you remind yourself of the restrictions you have been placed under: the constraints to your free will and desire, which were masked so well by the shroud of falsity and fake love.

You try to think of a day that has passed which has been about you. 

It is revealed as you reach into the darkest recesses of your mind, searching with a flashlight of truth: the twisting of words and situations; the gentle caressing to flip the coin (which is scarred on both sides) to always land a certain way up.

The ghosts are surrounding you, whispering in your ears. You shudder and curl into a ball as, slowly, it’s revealing the past gone by with emotions shattered by the egotistical.

The half-truths of desire splintered by the need for validation. The corruption of your heart was molded by skilled hands—a professor of this art. This was no student; they wrote the book that lies on your chest. Its crushing weight suffocates you as they dictated which pages you can read and which they were writing with your tears.

This can’t be real, can it?

You try to balance on the curb and reach for the light that’s pulling you out of the darkness. You try not to fall off for fear of being shattered into a million pieces. It would be impossible to fix this time. You cling on to the hope—to something in those words spoken so beautifully with diamond-level clarity.

With a kaleidoscope of colours, that soul was a glimpse of the fallen—a vision of a fallen angel who has been lost along the way—twisted by the cruel fate of time’s desires. Time slowly pushed her to the ground, but her feathered wings were torn apart, piece by piece, by the demons that surrounded her. She screamed for mercy, but no one listened.

She rose like a phoenix from the ashes, determined to scold the world with the burning ambitions she had clearly laid before her, crumbling all those to ash who stood in her destructive path to success. 

But what success? She had nothing but broken dreams and hearts strewn in her trails.

You appreciated the beauty before you but can see the hurt behind the fiery eyes that gaze upon you with lustful desire.

There was a need to fill her blackened heart with warmth—to make her feel alive again, even just for a second—but you now know that it will drain you. It will drain your life force to the point that you will eventually wither and die. Each day will be harder than the next; each second will be more painful than the other.

You lift yourself from the ground, again, standing at the crossroads. You are emotionally beaten, but the scales have tipped. You take a deep breath, reach out your hand, and touch the fingers of fate. They guide you toward the life you deserve.

Years have passed; the crossroads is a distant memory. You’ve never once looked back, not even contemplating the paths you could have chosen, which could have led to a place of despair.

Instead, you smile, holding the hand of a person who loves you with all her heart, filling you with all you could have ever hoped and dreamt for. 

And you walk into the sunset of your future.