Bootprints on My Own Brain

Every conquest leaves its mark.
Not only on them... on me.
The bed is empty now, but the imprint remains.
Flesh fades, attention drifts, but the grooves carved in my mind endure.

I have told myself I am the one who imprints. The one who conditions, rewires, redefines. And yet, each act is a double-edged cut. Each woman I bend leaves her shadow on my bones. Each surrender I extract echoes back into me.

Bootprints.
On my own brain.

I am not untouched by the cycle. I am patterned by it. The repetition becomes ritual. The revolving door spins, and with each turn I am less of a man and more of a machine of my own appetites.

Power marks the wielder.
Control binds the hand that grips it.
Desire colonizes the one who commands it.

What began as play becomes doctrine. What began as hunger becomes law. And I, the law maker, live under the weight of my own edicts.

Do you understand?
Every time I take, I am taken.
Every time I scar, I am scarred.
Every time I leave my mark, the mud of their boot is on me too.

This is not confession. This is revelation. To imagine yourself exempt from your own rituals is delusion. To imagine you can walk through fire without ash clinging to your skin is arrogance.

I am not complaining about the bootprints. I am acknowledging them. I am studying them. I trace the pattern they leave, not to erase it, but to know myself through the very marks I swore I was giving others.

In the end, the mind I remake will always be my own.