There is nothing. There is no one. There is only me. There are only my words that fill the indomitable silence. There is only this moment filling the eternal hourglass of moments.
I can’t remember when I last saw the daylight. Even though my eyes have adjusted as much as they will, my entire world is a shadow. The closeness of the dark is a heavy blanket that mutes the smallest sound. I can’t even know that what I am writing will make it to anyone let alone that if it does it will be legible. Blood and the dark are friendly conspirators, and they don’t make writing easy.
Crimes against my sex. This was the judgement passed down. I’m not even sure what this means. Before I could seek clarification or even protest the lack of due process, I was passed from sets of hands to sets of hands to the cold recesses of my current predicament. The door was shut, locked, and that was that. All that’s left to do is accept the sentence. If I am guilty, then I am guilty. I welcome that small comfort of knowledge. Besides, I have to save my strength to write, not waste it raging about injustice.
When I was a girl, I used to fancy the macabre Poe stories. Now that I am living one, I see now why Poe wrote about them so often. It wasn’t all to thrill readers with tales of living entombment and the unending sorrow and pinning of love cut short by death. It was to share the fear of inevitable and unending solitude. As if the act of sharing the fear through words took away some of its power. It didn’t work out for Poe though, and I don’t think it’s going to work out for me.
There is nothing. There is no one. There is only me and not much left at that. There are only the words now I send out as offerings: mellifluous, ineffable, verisimilitude, ephemeral, abide, nubile, quixotic, aplomb, ennui. I tick them off like the second hand of a watch. They don’t make the greatest bedfellows, but they do fill the silence.
Unbound 