From this angle you look like Hephaestus, with your polished scruffiness and knowingness. Perhaps I’ll never be of importance as I gaze at the twinkling flames and whatever your welding.

     Whereas I am just a ghost you killed. It doesn’t matter if I catch your eyes – if a God doesn’t revel in a contrived affair, then I can guess I am already dead. If you are like me and your enigma of your temperament isn’t magnetic or elusive then you can succumb to just watching from afar. Don’t worry, your revolts about Love’s cruelty soon welds their own truce. Observation isn’t that harmful, so you think.

     When I look at you, I am tiptoeing around the devil’s quarters – he who supposedly loathes our kind. Yet we still sang those beautiful melodies on the night where you sealed my fate. I’ve relinquished reproaches about the tunes and cadences sung, there is no challenge against a God. The only such power a feeble soul like mine has is memory.

     You may like to forget what is named as sin, but we folded it into history. I remember. Is that my punishment rather than these blood-soaked, fear-crying flames that envelope me?

     Sure, continue your adventures and crafting the weapons to make ghosts of more souls, whilst the thievery of my youth amounts to one moment. However, our ambivalence to each other isn’t an old tale.

     But you still ended up murdering me. With my blood in your hands… Perhaps even a drop on your lips. For your sake, I hope the blessed aren’t listening when I speak this in mountains of crassness and utter disparity. But that wasn’t too alternate from life on ground that couldn’t burn, was it?

     You wouldn’t dare taste the air of freedom, you said it frightened you and what you would become. What you really meant to say, is that you’d become me. That, in all its entirety, kills me. Condemning me, to the devil’s quarters.

     Surely you should be encompassed in these flames for never looking truth and prerogative in the face? I will continue to say it aloud, we laid together. We laid together.

     You lied, alone.

​

     Will you shed a tear? Even if your kind celebrates our going into the pits of flames, sometimes I hope you will see me In all my futility. A shard of myself will rage, wishing for your guilt that my residual crimson incessantly stains, seeping into your veins. Tarnishing that perfect blue of yours.

     If those like me, as so proposed, sent to their personal damnation, I won’t pull away. Bring the stakes, bring the signs depicting my sin, bring the hate that I’ve so managed to avoid. Even so there’s no doubt I will end up yearnful, so pathetic I wouldn’t survive a day by denying.

     The poor souls assigned to the front gates – the air is humid and thick – hand me my name card. I look. I’m assigned to a category rather than a given name, I’m used to those. The word that was banished decades ago stares at me, glistening on the bronze platter. Starting with a strong, wilful ‘S’, ending in a scathingly blunt ‘mite.’ The hairs on my arms burn, not from being in a provokingly lava-bound region, but from brain-fogging fury. Is this true indignation?

     I expected to be faced with a judgement day like a nagging raggedness. Being surrounded by criminals, liars, adulterers, I wonder how many of us are wrongfully accused of our sins now that I know God has his favourites. It’s comforting to not notice any familiar faces. I wishfully think, maybe I must suffer so all I love aren’t faced with the same fate. I’ve acknowledged too late that one shouldn’t pervert their psyche by devilling with one of the Gods. Or at least someone who looks like one.

     If this is how it shall be, then I guess I have no choice but to be the schemist after all. My flesh and mystique burns, set alight, this iterative exposure.

     All because of you, Hephaestus look-alike.