It was always the same. Every year, I took the same flight at the same time from the same airport to land at Ladysmith airport in Kwazulu-Natal South Africa where I drove the first car I'd ever bought out of the parking lot, and down the pot-hole riddled road I had driven what felt like millions and millions of times before. The repetition never felt familiar, it never felt routine even though I knew every turn in the road to Port Elizabeth like it was a habit I had yet to break, regardless how many thousand miles or kilometers were between my old stomping grounds and my current home. The city didn't feel quite like home, no. Maybe a handful of square footage that I inhabited on a regular basis, but it wasn't home. Not in the way that the driver's seat of my near rustic 1996 Volkswagen who's putrid gray paint was peeling in an unsightly way that reminded me it had been many years since it looked pristine like my memory painted it, even though if I looked far enough ahead down the road and away from the immediate cloud of red dust, it was almost like it was twelve years back and the paint on the sides of the car had yet to begin to rip away from the body. Every pot hole jarred the car like a minor quake, the shocks had surely been either stolen or removed, and even though it was probably time to retire the clunker I focused what little energy I might have had to keep the metal surrounding the engine together; this, too, was the same as it always was.

As for now?

The paint was an extra layer of protection waxed over my skin, impermeable as the substance itself. Somehow, the humidity began to melt the wax and the paint peeled back a layer of my skin, leaving something tarnished, marred, and infected exposed. It was always the same. The humidity was thick and heavy, imposing the moment I stepped out of the plane on the tarmac with every ounce of ball and chain I had tried to leave in my home country. The weight always came barreling back with the force of a bull aiming for crimson and I the fool holding the flag. And in that very ball and chain existed a whirlwind of history that I managed to leave in the Ladysmith airport boarding areas every time I left my home. But every time I came back? There it was, waiting for me with a year's worth of festering bacteria, ready to infect me with the first open orifice I offered its nefarious patience. And I was the accepting host of its viral prowess, able to render me to a former shadow of myself that I thought was lost and buried beneath feet of dirt that surely would have solidified in the years since I had placed it.

I would forever belong to the Godless escape of this continent.

It was always the same, the suffocation I felt as the landscape of the cities unfolded in housing tenements roofed with sheets of metal built on blood red dirt streets. I had once longed to feel the dust clouds form under the soles of my shoes, longed to feel the salt ridden air dry my skin; the first time I had left the continent had torn me to pieces, scattering the remnants somewhere below leagues of Atlantic salt water in places I would never be able to find them again. Maybe they were pieces that needed to be shed like the dried scales of some reptile, useless for any purpose. I hardly dwelled on those lost shards, until tidal wave of tainted memories crashed over me without any shred of mercy. Oh, the weight of the white capped waves â€" I was always lost in silence as I drove through the city, allowing every once familiar sight to warp me to a time and place when they all held contemporary meaning. It was always the same, the way my breath hitched in my throat when I made that sharp left turn onto the road that was my dilapidated realm borne of a consequential night. I could always hear the desperate cries, marred with the blood curdling gurgles of said life force escaping lifeless bodies as they implored anyone listening for a nonexistent savior. I could always hear the gun shots like they were fired from the very barrel and trigger I might have held and truthfully? They might have been. The sectors of fired guns and stolen lives wandered these blood red streets, I was sure. And it was always the same the way a softer, vulnerable self exposed itself when with how I turned off the main road by passing an alley where I relinquished that first piece of myself to a darker mistress and a love for the macabre that would follow intimately in my wake for the rest of Kingdom come. As the cul-de-sac became visible once my car trekked over the sewage bridge that seemed to act like a moat around my childhood home, emotions escaped my immediate reach with such haste that it felt like the last time I had driven into the now empty driveway of the carcass of a house I grew up in.

Even the air inside the creaking screen door tasted the same; it was stale, musky with the influx of mold and haphazard cleaning if any at all. My sisters did not frequent the building any longer as it was surely condemned, but that didn't stop the way I filled the barren house with my silent presence even though I wasn't still in silence. Ghosts of everything we had lost, we had run from, and that we had held dear ran rampant over the creaking wooden stairs. Loud voices permeated the oppressive atmosphere, filled with strife, fear, and an incredible kind of persistent hope that perhaps there was some semblance of possibility of the future that never seemed to show its splendid head. And the feelings would being to end right where they'd started as the light faded from my treasured African sky, reminding me that I had other obligations. And when I stepped back onto the very same wrap around porch that, too, held heaviness with impending traps seemingly hidden just below the rotting wood, urging me to step on their decaying locations and fall victim to the hours I had spent in darkness there.

You must have always been here with me, for regardless of the time, space, and lifetimes that passed between my visits there was always a spectacular sunset. You were always here with me.

It was always the same.

The amount of time that walk took me never changed. It felt shorter now, though. Somehow. It was the same amount of footsteps, I knew the number by heart without any effort offered to counting. With every step, I would feel the knots beginning in the depths of a dark corner of my stomach, my head, my heart. There was a grate on that corner that was locked with a monster inside, though the monster was miniscule and in the form of a boy who had been reminiscent of me, but ... But he was without a worry line beginning between his eyebrows. His eyes were a fantastical shade of juvenile blue, bright and shining with hope for a time and a place that wasn't forsaken with nightmares and things that bumped in the night. Even if those things were him. He hovered in the corner of that cage, making no sounds though his shoulders shook with obvious shivers of distress. Distraught and haunted he became as the number of footsteps increased, and the blue of his eyes waned into a white symbolic of all that was innocent and good; though it was truly a shade of a maniac who found solace in the irreverent ravings of a sociopathic lunatic. It began to become interesting when he wrapped his suddenly dirty fingers around the dirt-slimed bars of his cage, shouting derogatory tinder to the fire that began somewhere close to the porch I'd left. With the flame scorching behind him, he twisted the bars into a space that he could contort and escape through, and I could only hang my head and cease fighting as the surveillance guard, as the security.

It was always the same, how I needed him to be the one to turn the knob on the unlocked door leading inside and it was him I needed to keep upright. Even now. Even over a decade later. I could hear the strain in my voice return as I braced for the impact I always felt when he and I shared the reins of governance over my body as I sat on the dusty, stained couch as I always did. The cushion had an imprint from the amount of times I had performed this very routine, acutely aware of my solitude and the familiar, welcome trepidation conniving its way into my blood, beginning to boil the substance in preparation of the final stop on the tour of horror. They knew I would come on this day, and they made themselves scarce as if to avoid reliving the moments beside me. As if the very sight of me would send them to the depths of hell that ultimately, I had shown them. And hellfire returned to my crystalline eyes, rendering them a shade of white that was reminiscent of the moments I had first been handed the weapon with which to bury all I had held sacred.

A weapon doesn't have to cause destruction, no. Not physically.

The stained shovel remained posted against the slumped wooden fence that surrounded the back yard that was haven to two headstones located in the dead center. It was always the same, how I went weak at the knees and felt a burning desire for a woman who was never my mother â€" for the care and comfort I had never received from her. With an infancy would I take short steps until I was close enough to allow myself to fall to the grassless dirt to survey the markers for what was my Eden. Her laugh would permeate the air, her hair would shine like a halo, and her warmth would over come me as if it was the first time we had lain together in the sand on the shore of an ocean that was my first love. She had taken the place of the water, wrapping her tender fingers around my heart and inscribing her name on the vessel; all of the could have beens, should have beens... They tormented the air with their seductive notes, a melody I heard only once a year though I knew it by heart and soul. The graves of the best parts of me held shards of my being that I would never retrieve, but had willingly given to both mother and son who lay beneath the heaps of dirt that buried both their bodies and what was left of whatever goodness I might have had a chance at embodying. Sympathy would have run her fingers over my cheek, gently and wordlessly brushing the tears of remembrance gracing my skin before leaving me to be at peace with a vulnerability that was released the moment he opened his cage, allowing me a glimpse of the man I could have been.

But fate, circumstance, and an unkind mistress had other plans for me, it would have seemed.

I offered prayers and sacrifices and flowers and whatever I could give to the graveyard that had once been her backyard, but somehow ... It wasn't the same, not this time. After the existence of the ghost that had been everything to me and her acceptance that I wanted happiness, that I wanted whatever it was she and I had had... I took the shovel that was stained with fear and vengeance and sunk it into the dirt guarding the sacred bodies. And when I was able to see scraps of pale skin, there was a flood of relief from my eyes as I dropped the shovel and knelt beside it, running the tips of my fingers over her skin, before shutting my eyes and allowing the body of the woman I'd loved to disintegrate and the ashes to escape into the salt ridden air to take her and the ashes of the second body to flee our physical plane and find peace.

I just came to say goodbye.

I found no burning desire to stay the full length of my typical venture into Africa. Instead, I welcomed the sight of the city I had intended to dread, welcoming the quiet, luxurious ambiance of the magic that my shop effused. And when I heard silence instead of the sunshine filled voice of the woman I had officially bid adieu to, my thoughts sounded like the words of the devil. And basking in that hellfire illuminated conversation, I slipped into the seat at the head of the table that was looming in the dark of the newest room to the Aresnaal building, created for the use of any of the witches who wanted it... I knew it wasn't any of them that needed sanctuary or saving.

It was me.

The cigarette between my lips tasted like redemption, rewarding me for finding my place at the table instead of in the stone guarded room of my place at the compound in Africa. There was no renewed sense of self effusing from my being, only a shadow of the grandeur I found characteristic of myself. A gentle ding of the front bell reminded me that I was, in fact, on the human plane where others might just find me, and I roused myself from the depths of the cage I hadn't locked in order to proceed to open the room's door with a gentle flick of my hand, alerting whoever it was that had entered that I was there and waiting without intent of greeting them. I had no semblance of myself, none other than the hesitant, troubled and yet somehow peaceful man I'd left my home as.