I am blinded by uncounted lightless days, by a half mile of stone, by walls that do not yield and cannot listen. My wide open eyes have absorbed darkness until I dream black and wake and know no change. When food comes, scraps, I hear nothing or I hear their voices, brutal voices, until the darkness crawls with shapeless, vengeful creatures that burrow in my ears and whisper venom.
I am condemned. No protestation of innocence, no begging or weeping or screaming, opens the door. I am innocent, I am innocent–I was innocent, and for lost years I have stared into the darkness. It is my mirror, and I am condemned.
The cell is small, but so am I, shrinking to match my cage, expanding to fill the days, the months, the–I shudder. Time exhales the last breath of the dying. Nothing moves and nothing changes and nothing is. I sleep and I wake and I sometimes eat. I stare into my blindness and listen to the silence. What I think is what I see is what I hear. What I knew is no longer, or seems a shadow, a flicker of night against night, the echo of a shape or the remembrance of the idea of a color.
But I feel. I feel the rock beneath me. I rub my hand, my fingers, along the same smoothed spot. I ache in my hips and my legs and my back. This is pleasure, for it changes, it has a rise and a fall, a contour. It visits me and does not remain silent.
I will not die here. I will cease here. I will no longer open my mouth, I will shut my useless eyes, and I will remain, motionless, until I become one with my prison, perhaps a warm thing for a time but a senseless thing, a rock in the shape of a man, until I become what I see and what I hear and what I am.
A voice comes. I do not stir. Always they come and always they leave, like memories and earthquakes, signs of an epoch passing. The door opens. I am struck. I was beat in the beginning. This is different. It is a force, a blast. I burn. Within, I burn. I turn away from this new torture, shut my eyes. I am in its grip, and it burns, these others, these foreign things on my lonely flesh. The world is spinning, the air cuts my face. I cannot scream; I can moan. They pull my limbs, force me to collect the expanse of my existence into my body, force me into the void as a solid thing. It is too much, too much noise, too many sensations–the world is catching fire. I burn and I weep. “No, no, no….,” I whimper. The darkness will burn away and I am only darkness. I will burst. I will break into a million pieces. I cannot survive this, I cannot bear this touch, this light. “Take me back,” I beg, weeping, convulsing. “Take me back.”
“You’re free.”
I cannot. I am paper thin, I am smoke, I am the depth of the earth and human hearts. “Take me back.” It is forcing its way into my closed eyes, into my brain, a blaze that is warmth that is fire that is death. I pull away, desperate, strong for the moment, escaping their claws. I stumble, I crawl back to the black opening, to the pit, and tumble down into the hole where I belong.
The stone is hard as I fall and I ache and I am blind once again.