Shades of hesitant conversation, and fiery eyes, angry, yet
sad: I don’t want to lose sight of these visions in the dark night of penitence
that has come upon me. So listen, listen to this feeble voice, before the
vulgar waves of the oceans separating us drown it out. My life begins in death;
wailing, sobbing, trying to find for itself a face in a mirror of horrors. Radiant
visages, muted, motionless, lie concealed in their unreachable homes of impenetrable
darkness, shimmering away their eternal grace. I try and steal their glow, just
to find my own way. But I do not always succeed. I stumble, I fall. Silver-tongued
wraiths appear to me in friendly forms, leading me astray with dishonest
enticements. I follow blindly; I let greed and desire be my guides. Until I
reach a crossroads where all the world is hostile to me, and I myself am my
biggest enemy. I fight these demons, individually, and all at once. I fight
them with all I’ve got. I fight them until my sanity dangles by a hair from the
edge of oblivion. It is a bitter fight; it is an unending fight. It is a fight
that leads me to unfamiliar places; places where nobody recognizes me, and I
struggle to recognize myself. It becomes a strange imprisonment where polite
nods and soft smiles define the parameters of my solitary confinement; it
becomes a strange exile where amidst the cacophony of a thousand voices, there
is every opportunity to carry on uninterrupted conversations with the self. I
crane my neck above the crowd to try and steal a peek at the familiarity left
so far behind. I see brilliant flashes of color and light; I see two souls
fusing; I hear the music of joyful celebration. But the odes to love and
happiness that the flute sings reach my ears only as tunes of lament and
mourning. They evoke times that were simple, and magical; unchanging and
absolute. Times when we did not have to scour a thousand strangers’ faces in hopes
of finding a faint glimmer of lost familiarity. But remember, you: the
custodian of my blood; the keeper of my soul. I will come back for it; I will
come back to them. And you. And you will have the power to decide whether when
I look my soul in the eyes again, it stares back at me with a stranger’s empty
gaze, or embraces me with the warm ease of a long lost friend. Be just, you; be
merciful. A weary pilgrim come home deserves not to be castaway as driftwood on
the seas of self-loathing and regret; a broken man deserves a chance to be one
again with fragments of his soul.
