Thank you Vanilla Cupcake for this one: "Dare to Dream". Yes, it's another challenge piece.
Don't forget who owns you.
That's what I tell myself when I start to fall into the intoxicating depth of human touch. Soft tracing fingers that can turn hard and sharp, digging, tearing, at any second. Fingers that can vanish and leave you unable to stand on your own. I trusted and believed in the hands, passively watched as they threaded chains around my waist to pin me down. That would keep me safe, they said. I didn't know. So glad they told me. How impossibly stupid of me not to know to stay safe. I kept letting them tighten the chains. After all, I wanted to be safe. If they made me a little misshapen, well, all the better that I would fit into my proper place before it was too late. Others could end up poking at a solid impenetrable barrier while the merciless onlookers refused to let them in, but not me. I was so lucky. I had the hands. And the chains. They would keep me safe. And if they dug into my skin a little, if they hurt and left bruises, well, such was the price to pay. But they went too far. They ceased the musical voices once they thought I'd learned to follow them blindly. And without it I winced and curled up from the harshness of the blows, the scratching of their finger bones. I tried to fend them off, frantic and blindsided, but couldn't move--so many heavy chains! How they hurt, digging into bone, ridging skin red and patterned. I had to act. So I cowered for them, whimpering, but really I never stopped planning. And I was slowly detangling each chain, kissing softly the most chafed places and entrusting them to the air to be healed. And that's how I broke free and tried to run. But tight vicelike fingers--those cursed hands!--closed around my wrists and ankles. They couldn't just let me go! And I couldn't just allow myself to be chained up again. I just wanted them to get their touch off me. You have to understand, I was desperate and so caught up in the moment. I had to fight back. I didn't mean to do what I did. I wanted to get them off me, push them back. But the fury, the mounting crackling energy of a soul chained and immobilized, writhing for so long, was unleashed through my own hands. I never wanted to see such cataclysmic destruction. I never would have wanted to cause it. But I didn't just shake them off, I utterly broke them. Ripped and tore, shattered them, left them behind in a trail of blood-streaked tears of disbelief. And so end these things.
Remember who owns you.
That's right. No human, but the sun-streaked forests and churning seas and sunset-swirled cliffs to which I will return. They tell you to come away from there. I won't fall for it again. I'm brave enough to leave behind everything for the chance to sink into such a beautiful dream. And never again can I allow soft hands to pull me gently in other directions. Because at the end of the day, no human has power enough to know--to own me.
Only the entire universe does, and that's where I'll go.