I have had silver laced around my ankles for as long as I can remember. Hearing the clinking of the chains of my own creation, I walked slowly, slowly (slowly). I have suffered greatly, at the hands of that which is wicked, and clever, and so beautiful I spent what feels like forever defending my right to life imprisonment.
I have been smoldering, considering, and often failing to make an appeal to the courthouse judge inside my own psyche, as if dreaming I could one day be free would ever get me there. Dreaming in a concrete box just serves to heat the square confines, the humidity of my tepid (once incandescent) mind refuses to evaporate, and so this abstract slice of time and space where I have laid for three hundred thousand days is so sticky with the hydrogen of my wasted dreams that I have done nothing but marinate.
Oh, make no mistake, what I have felt and traded for this fool’s gold kind of grace- you would never want a taste. I implore you that infinity is not a concept that goes well with humanity, and I always say I am not from Earth (but I am flesh, just the same).
The whirr of wasted youth, the dissonant cadence of my shameless tumble into chemical abuse… it is not a tune that I care to share with you.
What I care to share with you is how I plan to make the greatest of any and all prison breaks. If I were left to leave my fate in the hands of that which is greasy ebony, I know I would only ever continue to wish my soul would actively evaporate. I do not plan to ask for my freedom; no that’s something I could never ask for- it is something I must take.
Good thing I hid a nail file in my cell all these years, even if I nodded out so long, I think I forgot it even existed, even if I never thought I’d have the strength to use it. And so, I start sawing at these iron chains. It is tedious, grievous work (God, how the metal pressed against my skin bleeds and hurts) but I just grit my teeth and remember that these are not chains that I deserve.
I do not deserve to be shackled, tied to my misery. I deserve a window at least… no I deserve to bask in the daisies, to let the sun’s rays of Vitamin D color and embrace my haggard and cold body after a decade in captivity.
It is wretched work. My wrists are starting to hurt ‘till I think the marrow inside my body is bound to be what swiftly breaks.
That doesn’t happen. I hear the clink of silver clatter down to the stone floor.
I look around, somehow I am standing on grassy, sunlit ground. I am running through fields of lavender roses; I am bathing my soul in the scent of bright yellow posies.
There are still red and purple bruises, from all of the years I spent in chains. But they will heal and fade, as things always do within this peculiar manifestation of the intangible concept of time and space. If you learn one thing from me, it’s if you mistakenly step into hell (yet find it somewhere inside of yourself to turn back around) you, alike, will carry the burn scars all of your life.
But my lovely, at least yours will only reach up to your ankles. Hopefully one day my own scars will fade and change their shape.
What will not ever fade-not if I have much to say, not in eons or in days… is what I have learned from the time I spent shackled, caged, and chained, and it is quite a long list of lessons, but I can condense the theme of all of it, and sum it up like this:
Good riddance to the idea that I was never meant for Avalonian bliss. I think I’ll wait to die ‘till I next feel the creator’s kiss… I thought leaving my tower would put an end to all this but, I’m just getting started. Be well, I’ll see you when you find the keys to your own cell.