Cage

I was trapped in a cage that I had built around myself. I hadn’t realised it at that point. Nothing that happened was ever my fault. I was just defending myself, being a hero, trying to save the weak from the weight of the world pushing down on them.
People were mean. I’d encountered so much meanness in my life that I couldn’t tell the difference between someone being mean to me and someone trying to be nice. To me, it was all the same. People were either mean straight to your face, or they would disguise it behind a mask of kindness, similar to how a hero wears a costume so that you never know who they really are. So I copied their language, and I began to talk back to them the way that they talked to me.
The base of the cage had a solid foundation of untruths so thick that nothing could dig through it. It was made of lies and the occasional truths that became so entangled in one another that they became one colour and it was impossible to tell them apart. The colour was a dark one, so was my revenge.
The walls built up slowly. An occasional word here and there to start the bars. Then the sentences. They came flooding out like a volcano that had been waiting for a millennia to explode. They came out like a flowing river of lava, burning all of the victims relentlessly, not looking back or stopping to see the damage it had caused. Sometimes I wondered if my words ever caused someone to build up their cage too. By the time that the bars had formed the roof of the cage they had become so thick and twisted like the vines around sleeping beauty’s castle except that no sword could slice through them.
There was a door on the cage so small that I would only have been able to fit my hand through in an attempt to reach out and get help, but the door was too heavy and the door had a lock, and, unsurprisingly, I didn’t have the key. So instead of trying to shout through the bars whilst there was still a sliver of space to shout through, the volcano erupted again, except this time the lava was burning me.
Then I began to cover the insides of the walls, because once you’re stuck inside, you can’t get out. The cage became smaller and smaller until I was wrapped up so tightly that it became inescapable, the door was no longer accessible, and the key hole was so far away that it was only a pinprick of light in an infinite black hole condemned to darkness.
But as the light was all I could see, the light was all that I could look to; and one day I reached out to it and it took my hand, and I escaped the darkness, and stepped towards the light.

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