The Dark Cloud.

Every day I feel it, even now. A huge weight. A dark cloud. Maybe a demon. It is exhausting. Things like this never go away, that's what I believe anyway. They can be improved, some would say cured, they can never improve and also, they can worsen. The worst can happen. Then again, the best can happen.

The best means though, living with the thing you've been trying to escape, living with its continued presence. It's a parasite that cannot be cut out or poisoned and excreted, the best you can hope is that the parasite loses the upper hand. The parasite lost the upper hand for me several years ago now, it had spent close to forty years growing and developing its control over me, weighing me down. Something changed that gave me back a great deal of myself, the aspects that that dark cloud had made frequently invisible. I was able to have back visibility of most of myself, albeit often still partially obscured. I won back what I had spent decades almost losing, but over those many years, the demon had eaten into those parts of my innards, changed the colour scheme of parts of the world that had been hidden from me.

So, when I was given back some control over that demon, when he shrank mostly into the shadows, rather than overshadowing me, then I could, mostly, see the bigger picture. Unfortunately, what I saw was not what I hoped it might be, it was discoloured here and gnawed at there. But, still, it's better than the alternative, it's better than being pulled under.