“The darkness is a mirror of the depths of the soul. All that is hidden inside us, our desires and our fears, is projected onto the darkness.”
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She feels the pull of night, of things borne of the night.
She pushes herself up from the floor, where she has been laying face down, while listening to her music; that powerful, and very important haven. She’d returned to this place – a place she does not call home, but the closest she has been in a long while – to decompress and become reacquainted with her oldest friend, for she’d resigned herself to a world with no music, no laughter, no warmth, no peace. She had been deprived of those comforts for so… so very long. The lingering whisper of that deprivation had forced her deeper inside herself. It bespoke of those things beyond her control, and the changes left in their wake. These things she understands, accepts.
She knows there is some knowledge and experience that one ought never to give voice. It changes nothing. Or everything. She doesn’t need to prove, with words, that she can survive the trenches. She is still here, still alive. How alive is a matter for time to tell.
There are new stains…
Stains that have changed her as a woman, as a human being, as a sympathetic empath with a heart. She feels with a heart which has been weighed, measured, and branded as defective – faithless – from having been nourished by the ways of man, and this world. She sees through eyes… more jaded by time. She thinks with a mind diseased by a flawed genetic pool, silver linings, unrealistic expectations, distorted fairy tales and, her own paradise lost. The crimson can never be washed away. She knows there is no whitewash for a woman like herself. If you took her hand, you’d feel the slick taint of the unforgiven.
This is a different kind of breaking.
With the sum of her choices and their consequence swimming in her head, she urgently pads barefoot to the back doors, taking the ancient, oval knobs into her hands and, she hesitates….
There is something so final and hopeful about closed doors.
She ponders, momentarily, on the crossing of thresholds – of stepping through those in-between places that lead one upon another path, acutely aware of the colliding emotions in her chest. The feelings are like savage starbursts trying to tear a hole through her to free themselves. She feels the air distinctly change; as it becomes dense and heavy, it hurts to breathe. She pulls in a ragged breath, and slowly turns the handle of each door, gently swinging them forward and out into the dark. The gust of wind that washes over her is unseasonably frigid, causing the first tear that falls to feel like molten lava, scalding a searing path down her weathered face… resting like a small, warm river between her lips. It tastes of too much salt.
Behind her, the music plays on.
Inexplicably, its affect on her is very different now; in her ears, somehow, more bittersweet. Everything in her world is changing – odd, that even familiar music feels so different. It takes on a different shape, color, energy, feeling, and meaning with the intensity of the emotions riding her. She listens, raptly – hearing every single word – ensnared; realizing how very deeply she had allowed her delusions to mislead her. She questions her hold on those illusions, and the terrible dream of reclaiming an irretrievable past, then closes her eyes, abandoning hope amid the turmoil and despair. She exhales with a long, anguished sigh. In her unfettered repose, she closes her eyes and begins letting them go with every passing note.
Between songs, the silence is so deep, she can hear her own hollowness.
Perhaps she had, indeed, become stronger through her weaknesses and trials, but made weaker in her love – after all.
The thought is a fleeting one.
It’s the music, coming from inside, that suddenly seems so unbearably loud. She hears a song by ‘Hurt’ begin – the bells ring their toll, and as they fade, he starts singing of his heart, his pain, his anger – his resolve. The lyrics make her feel like screaming, to drown out the violence of the chattering muck slicing its way through her mind. Impulsively, she places her hands over her ears to muffle the echoes of past chastisements that are rebounding in her head… “and O, by the way, with all you did, nothing has changed, so lie like a waste by the side. Cause everything just falls apart. ‘Cuz everything just fell apart for me…” He says that he cracked his head and broke his heart.
That wasn’t all he broke.
She feels her lips spread into a bitterly twisted, but involuntary smile, breaking the spell of the horrific moment. She walks hastily across the deck and goes quickly down the stairs; stepping into the cold, wet grass and nearly runs to the gate where the nightshade is in full bloom, to begin her task.…
Something makes her still.
Standing under the moonless sky, she lifts her face toward the vast canopy of stars and chokes – releasing the broken, heart-wrenching sob that has risen in her. It is upon her now. Her left arm instinctively moves to cover her breast, just over her heart. The wet sorrow drips from her chin, spatters her hand and falls, sinking into the earth. Her eyes close as she nods her assent; silently embracing the deepening darkness. She reaches for her baneful, deadly night-flower and succumbs to the awful, creeping melancholy that winds its wicked, sinister way inside of her; slithering through her like a strangling vine.
The demons are taking their meat.
It is now done.
No, she has no voice… not tonight.
While riding ‘fences’ – and walls – a heavy toll is duly extracted.
☼
They are the same, you know – hopes and fears – although the meanings may seem very different, they are not…
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