Disguises.

We all have guardian angels, they quietly follow us and do their best to protect us from the evil seductress that would love nothing more than to help us go down in flames. Mine is my great Grandmother, I believe she is the voice in my head that makes me feel guilty when I am doing something like lying or cheating, she's the voice that tells me I'm a good writer and musician, and that I should call my Mother more than once a month.
There is also a Dark Lord in all of us as well... most people are genetically structured to ignore this voice and automatically do the right thing, I unfortunately was not born with that convenience. My Dark Lord uses a megaphone, wakes up at least a half hour before my guardian angel, and stays up well past anyone else in my head. He also disguises himself as my angel, masking something that will soak me in shame as a warm ball of light.. only to strip off his fake wings after the fact, and point his blackened crooked finger at me as I hang my head in complete remorse.
Escaping this voice just won't happen, it wasn't there when I was a child, and I'm not really sure what night it was when he floated through my bedroom window, riding on a warm breeze past my poster of Farrah Fawcett, and gently streaming himself up my left nostril into my brain. It doesn't make any sense to me a lot of the time, my Grandmothers spirit is way stronger than anything I had ever seen, or unseen... before she died her connection to God was so intense that all she did was sit in a chair with a knitted quilt over her legs, praying in Italian... from the time she opened her eyes in the morning, until she fell asleep. I'm pretty sure she even prayed in her sleep. The safest I had ever felt in my life was when I would sleep in her bed as a little boy, resting my eyes to the sound of her heartbeat and the whisperings of one hundred Hail Mary's.

I'm pretty sure I handed the Dark Lord a megaphone when I was about 12, and listened whenever he spoke. The more I listened the more powerful he became, and before I knew it, I was trapped in the grips of a hopeless state of existence, disguised as an easy carefree life. Believing that the path of the numb was the easiest way to live... until it gets so dark you have no way out except to want to die. Wrapping around my brain like a squid, shedding black ink to cloud any type of sanity. The angels voice is now in all lower case letters, and the bold, and capitalized Dark Lord types fear and judgement into the keyboard on my tongue. There are brief moments when I hear my Grandmother praying, and it scares the shit out of me. The sacred place where I used to rest on her chest is now well decomposed and gone forever, and my only hope is to quiet my mind enough to listen to her, so she can tell me where my new resting place is... it's somewhere, it's somewhere real close. All I have to do is find her voice again and listen carefully. God is in the pause... maybe the resting place is somewhere in her Hail Mary.