Post by Lisenet on Oct 14, 2013 19:12:58 GMT -5
There are places in this world where the silence is so very sonorous that your ears weep with the joy of it, the plains are so very vast and the grass so sweet-smelling and the sky so very soft and the water so very light that you wonder if it is even real because you know the world you have to share with everybody else is not so kind. But it is real, because your imagination and your mind and your thoughts are as real as anything else, just only to you. This world is infinite and perfect, and it exists only as you wish it to, for nobody else can touch it. Here nobody else can hurt you. You are safe in this place.
Except these places are constructed of memories. And the only memories I have are of hard sand and the harshest sky I have ever seen bearing down on me. I have no safe place. My mind is a precipice, and no matter where I turn my toes scrape the edge. Stones rattle off and I wonder if they are the missing spaces, or the dry residues left over from things I have lost. I have no mother. No father. No siblings, no cousins, no grandparents, no nieces or nephews, no family of any kind. No companions, for there is nobody who knows me and nobody I know. Nobody who loves me and nobody for me to love. These strangers all stand around me looking in. To me it looks like they are standing on air. But when I look down I see that it is I who has no ground and I begin to fall again, until I can forget that I have nothing to remember. When there is nothing for me to remember, I am happier forgetting.
It makes me very confused. Nobody else realizes the sheer weight of emptiness. My body remembers living. It tugs at me to dance and it knows many of the steps that I have forgotten. My memories were rain in the desert; if ever they recollect, they will never again be as they once were. I will never be as I was. To those who knew me I will have died. I have been reborn into a body that loathes and laments my inadequacy. I am not enough. I can never be whole again.
Is it anything less than murder to destroy a person's past rather than destroy their future? Is it any less traumatizing? Worse, perhaps. In true death there is no hope for recovery to taunt you. Whether or not I recover what has been lost, the future I wanted and will never have will always stand over me and look down.
I started running only days after Aigbert brought me back to the army camp. I don't know what I am running from or toward, but I feel so much better for doing whatever it Is. After the first couple of gasping sprints, the men get used to my breathless coming and goings. I take a different direction every day. I was tempted to go the same way every time so I could know how it felt to remember something, recognize it, but I did that once and it felt so comfortig that I knew it had to be some form of giving up and I never went that way again. As little as I do know, already my silent watched tells me that anything easy isn't worth having, that if anything is easy I must be doing it wrong.
There aren't very many trees in this direction, but they are becoming thicker and taller. I dart around a few trees, bare feet skidding in the dry soil, and collide abruptly with another breathing body and tumble headlong, catching myself on one hand.
That was unexpected. But then again, I'm not very good at expecting things. That's the sort of thing one can only do when they have past experiences to base things on.
[Open to anyone who won't tell her what or who she is.]
Except these places are constructed of memories. And the only memories I have are of hard sand and the harshest sky I have ever seen bearing down on me. I have no safe place. My mind is a precipice, and no matter where I turn my toes scrape the edge. Stones rattle off and I wonder if they are the missing spaces, or the dry residues left over from things I have lost. I have no mother. No father. No siblings, no cousins, no grandparents, no nieces or nephews, no family of any kind. No companions, for there is nobody who knows me and nobody I know. Nobody who loves me and nobody for me to love. These strangers all stand around me looking in. To me it looks like they are standing on air. But when I look down I see that it is I who has no ground and I begin to fall again, until I can forget that I have nothing to remember. When there is nothing for me to remember, I am happier forgetting.
It makes me very confused. Nobody else realizes the sheer weight of emptiness. My body remembers living. It tugs at me to dance and it knows many of the steps that I have forgotten. My memories were rain in the desert; if ever they recollect, they will never again be as they once were. I will never be as I was. To those who knew me I will have died. I have been reborn into a body that loathes and laments my inadequacy. I am not enough. I can never be whole again.
Is it anything less than murder to destroy a person's past rather than destroy their future? Is it any less traumatizing? Worse, perhaps. In true death there is no hope for recovery to taunt you. Whether or not I recover what has been lost, the future I wanted and will never have will always stand over me and look down.
*
I started running only days after Aigbert brought me back to the army camp. I don't know what I am running from or toward, but I feel so much better for doing whatever it Is. After the first couple of gasping sprints, the men get used to my breathless coming and goings. I take a different direction every day. I was tempted to go the same way every time so I could know how it felt to remember something, recognize it, but I did that once and it felt so comfortig that I knew it had to be some form of giving up and I never went that way again. As little as I do know, already my silent watched tells me that anything easy isn't worth having, that if anything is easy I must be doing it wrong.
There aren't very many trees in this direction, but they are becoming thicker and taller. I dart around a few trees, bare feet skidding in the dry soil, and collide abruptly with another breathing body and tumble headlong, catching myself on one hand.
That was unexpected. But then again, I'm not very good at expecting things. That's the sort of thing one can only do when they have past experiences to base things on.
[Open to anyone who won't tell her what or who she is.]
