You're sitting in the train, looking out of the window as the landscape passes by, wondering what made you sit here, what made you follow her lure call. You sigh loudly—or lowly? You don't know, really, for the droning coming from your headphones drowns all exterior sounds. Loud enough, at least, to earn a worried look from the girl sitting in the same compartment. You choose to ignore her gaze as you are too absorbed by recalling how you ended up sitting in that train to your sanity's certain bane.

***

A Sunday afternoon similar to the previous few Sunday afternoons: trying to distract yourself from the grief over a wrecked relationship, trying to salvage what was left of the train wreck you had once called your mind and to cleanse the latter from the years-long brainwashing spell she had cast on you. Rationally, you understood she had abused you, taken advantage of her influence on you, used you for her pleasure until she had grown tired of you and disposed of you like a toy that had exhausted its use. Still, your heart yearned her touch, her warmth, her closeness, her voice... her vicious abuse.

A flicker on the phone screen accompanied by a vibration and a name tag. Once more, her soothing, mellow words promising love, yet dripping with her deathly venom appeared. The short text, however comforting and warm, hid a request which, if not met swiftly, would entail draconian measures of her part. You knew all her little games by heart from the long years during which you had endured her cruelties—her exploitation of your immature credulity—to please her, for too blinded by your unconditional love you were to see past the clement mask she wore to trick you into believing she meant well for you.

It would have been easy to just ignore the message had it not been for your heart. Your entire consciousness was determined to deny her the joy of toying with you, of falling back into her cold grasp. Your heart, however, still was the puppet to every snap of her fingers. For merely this reason, without further questioning, you packed the absolutely necessary—your headphones being the most essential part of it, bearing the hope the noise-canceling would also drown the voice of reason which dominated your thoughts—and rushed to the train station.

***

You take a brief glance at the girl sitting in your compartment. Her beauty looks worthy of consoling you over the misery you've suffered, worthy of the much-needed change of ideas the last remains of rationality in your mind constantly demand. Yet your heart refuses to cheat its own intentions as if it was drawn to the torture and the bleeding caused by her vampire-like claws, almost willing to get mended only to be slowly bled dry and shattered once more.

Your stop. You get up. Through the mist of your crushing thoughts, you manage a faint smile as you leave the pretty girl alone. Although she smiles back, it can't cover the concern written all over her face. Your brain tells you to stop, to seize the chance, to break free, to take the helping hand her eyes are offering you, yet its desperate pleading gets swallowed by the noise-canceling of your headphones, leaving you exposed to your heart's self-destructive craving.

On the short walk, you register a faint noise in the back of your head—the vain attempts of your voice of reason to predominate the murky sounds blasting from the membranes. It's only when you step up the porch and slide the worn-out over-ear cushions—your sole substitute for the tender, solacing touch you've been deprived of—off your ears, one single, dying word pierces through the veil of your love-drunk high: "Don't—" before the door opens, her waiting behind it, arms crossed in a defensive position, eyes filled with tears. Your heart melts. You can't fight it. You know full well it's a trap. Alas, you are too feeble to resist; too weak to defy her simple, yet effective deceit. Her control over you is far too complete.

While the last iota of reason within your mind struggles for audience, you don't even try to resist her arms that wrap around your neck and pull you into the soothing, familiar embrace you've been denied for weeks, months even, forever silencing that faint voice which has been no more than a mere nuisance. Yet, although aware that it was speaking the truth, you've chosen to ignore it, despite knowing this to be your admission to the ship of fools.

As you feel her lips on yours, you melt into her arms, completely surrendering once more to her devious charms, becoming slave to her little games as you have been for all those years, subject to her unpredictable caprices. She owns you. She doesn't even need to seduce you as you are but a lowly serf to her imperial charms, all her spiteful manipulations, all her sardonic mental abuse forgotten as you willingly enter aboard this ship of torment that has nowhere to go but down.

You expect to feel yourself fall into the abyss of self-inflicted agony. Instead, you look into those eyes, glistening with feigned love and know she is holding on to you, tricking you into believing she's saving you from your inevitable descent into pitch-blackness. Yet you know she is taking advantage of her position of power over your demise, wielding it to hurt you as she sees fit.

Following her into her bedroom like a puppet unable to cut its strings—a fish caught on a line—her scent, the smell of her room fill your nostrils, wringing your heart with each flash of memories you once deemed precious but now only represents a collection of painful reminders of how her malicious claws have an irresistible hold on your soul, slowly draining your sanity and prepossessing your mind. As she whispers her dishonest sweet nothings into your ear while you penetrate her, you feel her grip tighten, bleeding you dry of the last drops of reason your mind still possesses, yet you indulge in the familiarity of the false feeling of security she gives you.

Every thrust of your hips appears to seam together bits of the snippets that once formed your thriving heart as you fall slave again to that strange being you know to be a venomous snake ready to sink its fangs into the freshly formed scars to tear them apart anew. The only moment of weakness she grants you is her climax, which shows an ever so brief glimpse of her honest love for you as her flesh convulses on yours. You rejoice in her display of genuine affection, however elusive it is, seeking in vain for proof that your mind was wrong all along.

As you are primed for your own release shortly after you let her recover from what you thought—against your better judgment—was her surrender to her true emotions, she has already changed to her true heinous self you have painfully become used to against all hope to find in it the soft, caring angel you once knew. Instead of returning the favor and granting you the relief of months of forbidden desire, she slaps you, scolds you, accuses you to have exhausted your usefulness, abused her, taken advantage of her vulnerability. The knife twisted, she keeps rubbing salt into the fresh wound spilling your very lifeblood by throwing you out of her bed onto the heap of your clothes. You don't even dare defend yourself for you are too hurt; her sudden, ultimate strike too deep.

Your heart mortally wounded, you stagger back to the train station, barely in time for the last connection. Over your turmoil, you have forgotten to nestle your ears into the cushions you've used as a substitute for her familiar embrace and to numb the sadness. In vain, you desperately look for the girl you've seen on the way here. Failing to find her, you sink onto the bench of the first compartment of the empty train wagon. Tears start falling from your eyes, yet you are silent. You don't even snuffle. All you do is fall into a dreamless, healing slumber from which you will awaken anew, leaving all your agony behind as a new dawn arises and with it, a new you.