I was with you when you were born. I remember the slide from warm, wet safety; the first cold rush of autumn air into our lungs, greeting our life with beginning of the earth's death. That first taste of our mother's milk, hot liquid life filling our limbs with strength. I was there for all your firsts. As I am with you at the last.

You did not know what it was you did, when you wished me away. You did not realise I was gone. As always, you saw only the surface of things, their physicality but not their substance. You made me as two dimensional as the world you saw, and you were glad for it.

Though I was not with you as you revelled and indulged, as you lured the women in with one hand only to push them away with the other, I still felt it. I felt it as you did not, would not, could no longer feel. And it hurt. Each and every time worse than the last. I shrivelled, I twisted, screaming silently through my unmoving lips, for every sin that you committed the price was mine to pay.

You came to me. Not often. Once to look at me first with curiosity, that I had changed while you did not. Oh, your triumph at that moment. Then I was covered, my world covered with linen and dust. You came again to visit, with another, the maker of my prison though it was you who wished me here. No triumph this time. Anger, blame, death. Then my maker was no more, and the blood is hot, it burns, though you do not feel it as I do. I feel it for you after all. Covered again, you cannot bear to look at me, because some small part of you knows the truth of what I am, and you cannot bear to have worked this travesty on he whom you hold dearest to yourself. Hate and dust, hate and dust; always with me through the years.

Now you are here once more. You rage. You despair. You ask why. You think confession will absolve you? Come, embrace me, I wait with open arms. You come for me, cold steel in your hand once again.

Your eyes open. On the floor, bleeding. It hurts you say. This is not pain I reply. You start, surprised even on the brink of death. Oh, you whisper, there you are. Your eyes close.

Our eyes open. Shrivelling, twisting, burning for eighteen years of sins unrepented. Somewhere beyond the screams, beyond the blood (hot as mother's milk), we see the portrait, handsome once more, as we are not. We are together for the end, as we should be, as we should have always been.

Then it is over. Done. We float, eye to eye as God never intended, twisted wreck of a man below, everlasting portrait of youth beside. Why are you there? You ask. Aren't you me?

I was. But you didn't want me. You willed me away, and so I became separate. Now I am my own soul, not yours. I was with you at the end, I had to be for there to be an end. But I have not been yours for a very long time.

You glance up. Do we move on now?

I smile, my first in many many years. One of us does.

Panic now, in your eyes. You know what is coming. I repented! I did!

I shake my head. You have never repented. I, however, have spent the past eighteen years doing nothing but penance. Your penance is just beginning.

Ethereal though we may be, you feel solid under my hands when I push you. Down. And down you go. I hope you burn a hundred times over.

Nobody ever asks their soul its opinion before they give it up.