Prehistoric illustrations depict Satan, known also as The Devil, as a red-skinned buff demon with horns and bat wings. Some even add a hoof instead of one or both legs. But this only scares middle-school kids at best, am I right?
Kids, mostly because of their colorful imagination, are likely to believe (and spice up) anything. As they grow, they lose expectations. Every day, they are closer and closer to a point where they believe they won't meet Satan at all. Or any of the now faded creatures stories and parents told them about.
Yes – faded. The wingspan shrinks day after day, horns reluctantly lower as once wild visions now become just scrawled child drawings and a thousand of broken pencil leads. Blinding red is now dark pink and eyes are robbed of their mischievous sparks. Kids change, because of adults: and adults know better than childish fantasies.
Because adults will sit down one day, at home, in a restaurant, at work or maybe at a hairdresser's. And they will look up from their mobile phones, magazines, flyers that imprint reality in their brain, for so long and so intensively they rely on it and nothing else; they will turn their head and look Satan right in the eye.
Accidentally, an eye falls into an eye, as innocent as a lovers' embrace. They didn't mean to do it.
No bent horns jutting from a thick, terrifying skull, no flaming vermillion skin. No hooves to clop when they try to run. Because they didn't mean to.
The only thing they see is the distorted image, warped by years of observation. An image copying their moves perfectly, returning an image of the same horrified face and the same amount of scars seen by no one.
They see themselves. But... they didn't mean it.
They didn't mean to. It was not their intention, ever, to become a Satan, an image so dreadful it kept them awake at night. To become haunted, thinking thoughts that feel like their own, even though they scare them. Sometimes scaring them to death. But no peculiar death; a very familiar one. The one that almost feels welcoming, natural, blooming from your own desire.
I know there is one in every and each of you. Find your Satan... before he finds you.