When They knocked on my door

I was ashamed and left in shambles when Pain came knocking on my door, yet I could not muster the energy to get up and answer his call. Afterward it was Guilt who glided upon the still air and made his way to the same doorstop, this time not knocking and instead looking inside through the peephole. Guilt found me then, saw me in a position of shame, lying fetus-like with listless thoughts, thoughts of which he remained unaware. Too absorbed in my own selfish self-loathing, I failed to hear the whimpers of Guilt, and he, too, joined Pain in an unreachable plane. Seasons passed and Reason rose from the depths of winter snow. Reason was resistant to the cold. Reason was a child of winter, used to the freezing chills of nature. He marched therefore with confidence toward my door and began banging incessantly. The door shook in its frame and almost came off its hinges. Yet even by the ceaseless rattling of the door I remained unaffected, for my eyes were too heavy and my legs too tired. Bang bang bang bang....I smiled and closed my eyes as the banging lullaby stabbed my eardrums.
To the tick tick of Time I opened my eyes, heavy still, as if weighed down by steel ingots, heavy weight just light enough to allow for a narrow slit, an opening just wide enough to allow for a comfortable view of the world around. My world was the same as before: my room seemed smaller than before. I could not tell if Time had been kind or cruel; the only instrument of Time was a clock, fully functional, cogs turning yet hands refusing to move, but the sound of Time defied the hands, tick ticking as if Time still moved, same as before, same as seasons past. I looked in the mirror and saw the face of an infant, the wrinkled hands of an old man. The mirror broke and so did Time. I was a fetus then with wrinkled skin, old skin, lost in a void with new abstracts, seeing images of this life and the life beyond and the life below playing before my eyes.
In all those memories I had done my fair share of apologizing and agonizing over pains that never existed, apologizing to my father and my mother and my soul for succumbing to wild desires, desires borne out of the marriage between imagination and flesh.
In all those memories I had subjected myself to enough unjustified torture, all a result of pitiful self-loathing dressed in humility, and I wondered if there would ever be an alternative to self-loathing, until I was born anew, in the same room and upon the same carpet. I wept at first for I feared of living the same life, but then Happiness landed its first strike upon the wooden door. In the beginning it seemed as if it wanted to play knock knock jokes, and I, feeling the same weariness as before, refused to move, yet the knocking only got louder as Time ticked along, and the longer I stayed down, the louder it became, until the door was almost off its hinges again. Then there was silence, and Happiness began knocking once more, following at first a slow and low rhythm.

It waited for a response.