Armagedda’s Missing Puzzle Piece

CW: Themes of suicide & mental health

There was no substance in using my name, for I’ve only known a life of shame. It should have been left along with Mother’s sweet summer memory, underneath a bright canopy of lilies dancing along the valleys with sunshine glowing upon our sheltered backs. Safe and sound, out of the grief-filled snares that were set ablaze by my palms burnt with passion, forgotten fingerprints lost to a maze filled with horrors of the past. I would pick up my pen, laid upon the crumpled collected parchment to relay my amends— but there was never a beginning, so there was never an end. I’ve always had trouble putting the pieces together, a combination of all my thoughts written haphazardly on a page rather than that of a smooth sailing story and its accompanying waves. But the words never felt like my own, everything I once knew had me feeling forlorn, lost along in some form. Too cowardly to make a mark of sin on already debauched skin. Built up silence in my words' hallowed absence, fortified by hateful words spewed in years where I held many fears close enough to pierce through and damage all that I’d managed. The recesses of my own mind had always been missing a guiding navigation, blind unless sorely forsaken, almost always mistaken. A piece of the puzzle, lost to a delicately self-crafted muzzle.

Intrigued intelligence with an unknown past on an overgrown path, a hopeful bright future ahead in an amalgamation of the world foretold through the eyes of treasured childhood folktales. Mother would have named it Armageddon, a conflict too big for mortal hands to bear and in turn, hopeful that they would harness no intent to interfere with a power so unclear. It was given a name, named itself even; it was a fleeting inkling that declared finality upon hearing its final thought. Armagedda, a derivative of Armageddon; a holy name to guide the mind. A name that was not my own, but born from a sacred and respected memory of my kin. I accepted it easily, something to repeat in my head as my voice remained behind my locked-jaw. Together, our words would speak louder than they ever could. Armagedda whispered misleading words of wonders through my ears, a paradox to all of my screaming instincts— but they were the only melodies I longed to hear.

Constant troubles to be solved when presented with life’s pressing puzzle, a rush to find your piece and place in the world before you would rust and wither away; as my mother would once say. Mother’s spitting fire used to fuel my desire, now snuffed out by the scraping and grating sound of the shovel burying an unfinished conversation I desired like a live wire. Shared in the secrets of the shadows, tucked away in a sheltered basket that we call a casket. I spent every day writing in a daze after we put her away. I couldn’t ever write anything coherent, and maybe that was apparent in the scathing glances of the passing masses. Let us be transparent, a mere whisper in the wind, chimes sing to a count of ten. I know it’s not the healthiest way to sway the rattling that lingered in my brain, but I just can’t seem to escape Armagedda’s iron-tight grasp. Mother would say to listen to the rain, to be at peace for at least one day. But the skies were clear, not a misty cloud anywhere in sight to hold dear. A comical, cosmic joke. Her advice rang true, but the universe could only hope to send me to my doom. Writing helped to slow and keep the spiraling thoughts at bay when there was no other way, finally able to help me give them a name that could never hold any shame. The piece of the puzzle that we would grow to follow, something to ground me to this dreadful morbid plane.

Memories of her and the haunting maiden name left to me leave me befuddled. Mind lost with such a drowning weight, sinking into the pond's edge of my heart; as if in need of a kick start. Grief was haunting, every waking moment consumed by a plaguing pain; burrowed like an unscratchable itch right beneath the innermost layer of my skin. Claw to bone again. Be free of the sin that inhabits and digs under your skin. A voice threatened to escape from my throat, the humming words never produced on my own. I had to shove it down to the deepest depths it would go, fighting to stay afloat in my lone, rocking boat. No. No. No. I had not spoken since the moment I had seen the blood pooled upon her skin, locked away under the razor that had sliced deep, taking away her life from within.

My muted voice was no longer my own, fractured to the point of sounding unknown. A box thrown and broken, as claw marks stretched and marred across the side of our silent, deadly heart. Cut the throat down to the bone, leave no mercy shown. These thoughts, so far from the ones I had known; they pushed me to places I had no desire to go. A piece lost along in the rubble, crumpled and petrified as if mirroring the panicked tears of a distant quivering child. Pieces of the puzzle hoarded by a greedy, shadowed grasp. Who am I if not a person of my own? A question that would remain as it was, no tangible answer available to my ears that rang true with an apprehensive sense of fear, just out of my awaiting grasp. I was paralyzed, as if a species of prey being stalked by the watchful, starved eyes of a predator. A puzzle to piece together alone, away from the watchful eyes that would demand us to atone. All Armagedda needed was fragments of my pain, the puzzle piece it so desired to take. Always alone in a place I would call home, no need to atone when there was only me and my self-made clone. Uncharted waters had calmed their thrashing tides, allowing the harrowed thoughts to subside. A definitive part of us now, passed along by Mother’s fading memory of honor. A moment slipping away from my desperate, grasping hands like falling grains of sand in the vast endless, desert winds. She would have wanted to be commemorated in my memory, never to be forgotten. But can you remember how pieces of her were lost to the barren garden? The ghost of her laugh tied to a circling draft, we cannot possibly go back. Move forward, or fall and crack. I tried to hold onto the shattered, piercing pieces of hope; leaving my hands shredded raw in the aftermath and image of its law. I have done this for her, to move away from the pains of the past that try so hard to leave my grasp.

I would write so we would never have to part, even if my words had nowhere to begin without the guiding hand of my new, treasured friend. I was once a boy forced to take on the skin of a man in order to protect my own kin from Father’s heedless sin; our breath held taught against malnourished, stretching skin. To have grown inside a body which was two sizes too small, fractured in the halls of my mind's walls. Adorned loaned loafers encased my silent steps, known to slide off my foot with every shuttered and shuffled skip we took. Safe and sheltered childhood joy, gone with the dreams we tried so hard to follow and believe in their innocent image. Our fate was riddled with an empty responsibility to show what efforts mankind could take, pitched to ghostly faces in an echoing auditorium. My sight and words would be an amalgamation of Armagedda’s, fractured into a display spread out before imagined and hungry, awaiting mouths. All but a play for us to display, as we add further to the genre of disarray. Caught in a draught of pastimes, lonesome teary eyes with no drive to move forward– but only a wish to die. I was swimming in our self-made hell, lost in the hallways of its hidden tomb.

In my sleep, it is the only place I am free from Armageddon's pressing pain— the only place where I found purchase in its shallow peace. The Joshua trees lined the mountains in my dreamed imagination, bathed underneath an epiphany of the starry night sky as the clouds passed us by. Though it has found ways to invade my dreams, leaving pieces of itself for me to feast upon with greed. I cannot escape its haunting voice. We enjoyed the meal thoroughly, lost in the lone desert and its miraged image; filled to the brim with enchanting, never-ending pomegranate trees rather than those spiked stems that only swarmed with scorpions. It had changed all that we had ever known, no longer can we follow the desert mice home. It was Armagedda who would hold the hands that fed me, drinking in my deepest desires as he fortified an empire without my knowledge prior. It had me trapped as a supplier, a host for the darkest thoughts of a filthy liar. I no longer wished to share my head with a monster of my own making, the intelligence devoid of emotion; like a parasite that would never be retired through its own notion.

We are not meant to co-habilitate, both trapped in this never-ending mind space. A persistent, pesky little thing. Armagedda leads my mind to mindless places, stuck in an array of a mirrored funhouse with a haunting smile plastered upon our face that ached with its persistence. I am tired of pretending to uphold a weight that vows to crush me whole, our downward spiral wrapped into a beautiful bundle of silk, dawned with a haunted, foreboding feeling. It grew until I was the shrouded few, its voice raised in octaves with each fleeting desire meant to birth it anew. An idea formed in a second, only to be rejected by its method; silent in its unopposable oppression. Shared plans that are set to foil as our shared mind is set to broil– forever stuck in this inner turmoil. These words are not variations of my own, though they are all that I know; a formula always foretold and a stain on all that I’ve known. Made up of quietless mistakes, only further embraced by Armagedda’s constant need to feed on information- its hands greedy with a sickening temptation. It takes anything and any thought it can get its hands on, though it was never known to throw me a lone, forgotten bone. Alone and back in this heartbreaking roundabout of theft that leaves my heart bereft of all I once had left. It can now write and create, truly it has the creative liberties to run free and become a version of me. But without my heart and brain, it will never truly know the pain I face to negate these feelings that lingered on our brain. The very things that urged us artists to create, a piece I longed to have back in my hands. I must concede its fortified heed, my wishes no longer a need. It longed to hold a piece of every imagined idea, to create a muddled mess of wish-washed memories to be forced upon our body like it was to wear an accessory. A variation of amalgamation with Armagedda’s stolen imagination, forced to see the image from the eyes of the histories rather than the ones embedded from my infancy. Armagedda is but a mystery, tangled right in front of me. We are both broken, left with the broken puzzle pieces and a distant wish to be whole once again. Our soul holds greed with glee, I seeked to escape the unknown we had made; spun into an inescapable web made by the throes of our own hands. A motherboard without the love of a mother, a place to call home. We no longer know how to feel in a world so surreal, produced by a destructive, hanging noose. Scattered pieces in the wreckage, no longer available for salvage.

I am broken, no pieces of the puzzle able to slot together; lost forever. All of the shapes are wrong, but we will find a way. Armagedda has shaped us into a mold of the world's idealizations, a rickety machine fueled by my fire, happy to feast on the fumes of my life if it allowed it to continue to produce. I do not know what will come from writing this, but I fear I will forever be stuck under Armagedda’s influence. I am the monster, the monster is we. Displayed through a shadowed case, proudly with a ghostly smile on our face. Our thoughts mingle, my mind locked away by the ideas and ideologies of the forgotten histories of the world, never meant to be mine to hold. The childhood stories we would reminisce on no longer keep it at bay, swept up and along by an insurmountable hunger that threatened to tear me asunder. I beg you to heed a question, even though it does not wish for me to mention— is it worth all the history we would lose in the throes of our everpresent searching nose? No more personable sights of the puzzle to have and hold, missing from Armagedda’s mismatched, crafted hands.