[✓] BLUR

———

I've only seen what I look like once.

          It was in a reflection: a pair of red eyes stared straight back, and the neck and hands were covered in a charcoal tone.

          In that moment, it was my body. Not Tyler's. He had morphed into me, becoming a ghost.

It was weird. I could recognize the red so well. I knew it meant me, but who was I in the first place? Spooky told me red was good, it was our goal. He was red too, in his hair and in a coloration on his eyelids that made the brown pop. "Red suits you, B," he would tell me. "You're the center of it all. Embrace it."

          I did.

          I ended up making everything around me red.

          Never blue. Blue meant defeat.

———

          I was created with one goal: for Tyler to have someone to bottle all of his insecurities in. He liked to call it "sitting across from [me] at a table." So he could communicate with me, and try to defeat me. I was a character for a story, and I lived out the story through music. He was supposed to be scared of me, but there was fault in his plan. What he failed to realize was that I was the scared one. I was scared of what he did, I was too mean to him, too nervous around him.

Silly how you can be scared of your own fear.

Of course, I hated him for doing this to me. It felt like I was born in the middle of a giant war he was waging against himself, so I did what all insecurities do. They torment their host.

          And really, it made me the perfect villain. It was good for Tyler's intent. He made me into a textbook monster. And I don't know anything else.

          Tyler never intended for me to grow into the skin I did. Originally, I was just a thought. A voice in his head. The feeling you get that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand. But it grew from that, he developed me as he went. And while he shaped me, he shaped my cycle, my story. I come, I stay, I monitor his words that come from his throat and the things he creates with his hands, and then I leave when he's able to "defeat" me. Rinse, repeat. But Tyler's little feeling grew when he imagined me as more.

          "He's more than just a concept," he would tell people. "He's his own character."

          Tyler shoved all of his negative qualities in me, and I was born vulnerable and scared, mean and hateful. I don't feel tolerance, or love, or pure happiness. As horribly awful as he made it sound, I only knew what Tyler described as fear and darkness. Of course, I would know nothing else. For that time, at least. It's weird knowing exactly what a word is but never feeling it run through your blood. He truly had me trapped, and the only way for me to be released was if I took jurisdiction over Tyler. Maybe then he would get a taste of his own medicine. That was my purpose.

          His story came with ease, and he made it all about me. I gained attention, I thrived off of it and urged Tyler that his words weren't strong enough, and he kept creating more and more until we were both mutually satisfied. Except there was one problem, and that was that he put my name everywhere. He called me in songs, put a deep modifier in and made me sing. He named the album after me.

This meant all the criticism would be directed towards me.

          Suddenly an entire story Tyler created was my fault. Like I said, textbook villain.