The House under the Uncharted Moonlit Sky

 

I have been walking for what seemed like years now, and I was exhausted. The uneven ground made the walking harder. None of the hills were very high, but they were pathless, and covered in shale and jagged rock. Sometimes there were plains of sticky, tarry pitch to cross, and my feet sank in almost to the ankles, dragging down my steps.

        I don't know how long I will be traveling. The sky had deepened from yellow to dark orange, smeared with roiling black clouds. The air was foul, thick with smoke and ash, but I didn't feel like staying for an argument. The following nights and days were the same. 

         The next day, I dragged myself up to the top of the steep hill and paused there. It sloped down steeply on the other side, ending in a plateau of gray rocks that stretched to the horizon, piled here and there with heaps of slag and shale. The sun had lowered in the sky, though it was still the same burned orange color. 

         My mind and heart were tired. I was silent, lost in thought, under the heavy cloud cover. I ducked into the darkness beyond... 

         At best I called it a successful retreat.

       I came to the shelter that once I depended on, still the pillars were the echoes of the past, hollow, nothing but a vast empty space. The roof was decaying and the ground continuously trembling. But they still dared to call it home.

     Under that vast empty space, in the cold dark chasm under the grey moonlit sky, I was dancing in the storm of thorns, it flew around and through me. But I stood firmly fixed, immovable trying to be resilient.

     It was a bizarre place I barely knew. The house of errors and flying demons where two chimeras howling. Their voices were deafening. Their eyes and tongue were fiery. Their words were like daggers. It buried deep within me. I felt nothing, only the throbbing hole they put in me. It made my mind coil and made my body drenched in anger and fear. They tossed and plunged me into the dark abyss only to know what hell felt like.

         I could hardly breathe. I could even hardly cry. The pain had already blinded my eyes that tears held back and only the feeling of numbness enveloped me.

     The words cut like a sharp dagger to the very depth of my flesh but to my heart and mind as well, unable to withstand the judgment and insubstantial reasons. My faculties tangled in silence. My temporal being coiled and bruised sent me to the brink of my frailty. It made me defenseless and fragile.

     The only refuge was the dark cold room, the time in the middle of the night when few were awake. It was the time when the world was mine. It was so quiet. That made me surrender to its calming and comforting power. Still, I could see the wall that was once the citadel of my strength had broken. I could now hear the unfamiliar scream of anguish and continuously wept in pain.

     I yelled my heart out. Dazed but not shattered. I could hardly draw air from my lungs because of my resistance. I let out a whisper then I suddenly noticed, it was my voice that I could hardly recognize.

      I couldn’t free myself because the chains of their title were tied around me. Only by death, only through it, I will gain freedom. Excruciating it seemed but it was the only way.

     After my untimely demise, bury me in the wilderness of the remote plains where angels fear to tread. But I will wait for the day to come when the wind calls my name to the place where I truly belong.