I birthed you in my head
I birthed you in my head. I leave you then to dust and rot, inside a flask from which I can peek through, a flask that won't break because glass is soft where I left you.
When it's your time, I shine on you a light, and you take center stage. I watch you move as I please, and smile when you say what I want to hear. That I'm right, and you, wrong. That I matter, and you, don't. That I am better, and you, so much worse. I am the audience and the conductor, the director and the critic. You have no mind of your own for you lived all your life in mine.
You were awful to me. You were awful to yourself. But in here, in this stage, inside this break-less flask, you are capable of no such thing. In your puny existence, you are as I want you to be, and have only the power I bestow you. Power of which I can take back any time, any day. My perception is your making, and my expectations your quirks. You hold my ideals as if they were light as a feather, and you yearn for my attention. My affection.
I keep you here safe and sound, bound by imagination, and gift you scripts on occasion to act whenever I want you to. The you that I perceive you to be is but a husk, a meat puppet that I push to stardom every odd season for my twisted sense of entertainment. I use you as a villain to appease my victimhood, and torture you bountifully to satiate my injustice. I use you when I remember I have you, and toss you aside as you did to me when you were real, and not a memory.
Because talking to you, the real you, the individual, independent, self-realized, physically bound you, would be pointless. Meaningless. The real you would only tarnish the one I birthed in my head, rendering the toy useless. Joyless. And I'd much rather keep you in this twisted sense of longing, than to open that flask and fill that emptiness with something else. Because the you I birthed in my head is the one I hoped you were. The you I saw in flickers of conversation and late night game sessions. Not the one that you told me you were. That you showed me you were.
I held on to it, until it was too much. The difference too glaring, the disappointment too big. I had to let go of the real you, to keep the one I birthed in my head.