Careless
Copyright Ó
2000 by Day
I must have dozed off. The lamp´s flickering startles me and the pen falls from my fingers. For a moment I stare at the hand-written sheets of paper scattered out on the crude desk. The desk which aside the chair I´m currently occupying and the narrow cot in the corner, are the only pieces of furniture in my cell. The cell that has been my home for the last fourteen years.
All this time I´ve been writing. Writing about my childhood, my brother, our wooden house at the lake. I know nobody will ever get to see the pages I have written. I know they will be destroyed the second I´m let out of the cell. For the first and the last time.
For some reason he has allowed me pen and paper in here. It´s old-fashioned, I know, and there was a time when I would have laughed in your face if you had told me I would ever be using these archaic tools. But things change. And so do people.
I used to be his entire world. I was his hero, I had all the answers. Whether they were right or wrong didn´t matter. He loved me. I know he did. And tonight he is set to be my executioner. My brother who used to be afraid of the dark and who would sneak into my room and climb into my bed.
I would pretend to be annoyed, threatening to throw him out, but in the end I always let him stay. Sometimes, I would wake him up and we would watch the sunrise over the lake together before he would go back to his own room, so mother wouldn´t know he had been afraid.
I´m tired now and to my surprise I find that after all theses years I have finally tired of writing. It took me fourteen years and one day to write it all down, and now there is nothing left inside me. I almost start to long for them to fetch me, but not quite. For I realize there is still one thing I have left to write about. The one thing I have been saving for last in the hopes my time would come before I could get there.
I know, I´m a coward. I know she deserves more than a few hastily scribbled notes on cheap and dirty paper, paper nobody will ever get to read.
Everything has been almost easy to write about in comparison. My mother´s death, my brother´s choice, my fight for freedom; those events were as easily put down on paper as if the very words in my head were forming and manifesting there. Even the betrayal and my sentencing seemed insignificant and distant, like it had happened to someone else, a long time ago.
But her. Her I cannot write. I want to. Desperately. As if writing about her would somehow bring her closer to me, bring her back. But the words are just empty and shallow. Mocking me with their harshness and brutality. So unfit for describing her and the impact she had on my life, and ultimately, my death.
She was so gentle with me. She would laugh and chase away my fears and my memories until there was only her.
From the moment I met her there was nobody else. Not even myself. I loved her. I loved her so much.
I have heard the pain should lessen, it hasn´t. I have heard it should become easier with the passing of time; it´s a lie.
I hurt as much as the day she was taken away from me. Ripped from my arms and my heart. My arms have healed long ago. My heart? I think she took it with her.
When I was happiest I saw the world through her eyes. Saw its beauty and its wonder. She made me believe in anything I wanted, if only for a while. Now, I have no faith left.
She loved me. That was her only crime and it became her undoing. Our love became our fate, as closely entwined as our bodies at night
I am glad that after tonight I´ll be no more because it has finally happened to me. The one thing I have feared since I was first driven through the gates of the prison.
It is not that I would forget her. That is not possible and although her image may blur in my mind and her voice fade in my dreams, she is forever a part of me. I am her. She made me who I am and her memory will be alive as long as I live.
It will cease to exist tonight, but I will be gone with it and that pleases me somehow. I promised her faithfulness until death and I have kept that promise. I may have broken so many other, but this I have kept. It is a small accomplishment in an otherwise unfulfilled life.
No, what I feared would happen to me was the thing that has happened to so many others, even my fair-haired brother who used to be afraid of the dark.
I have stopped caring.
I don´t care about my own death, nor do I care about theirs. I don´t care if people are hurting, are in pain. I don´t care whether they starve or if they binge. Whether they are just and righteous or unjust and false. Whether they take or are being taken. Killers or victims, it is all the same to me now. I can no longer tell the difference.
I observe, I notice, I watch and I categorize, but I do not feel.
She would have been horrified by my change. I know she would and it pains me because in my own self-absorbed world that consists of my mind and my cell, I can still feel for her.
Sometimes I wish I couldn´t because it hurts, it still hurts so much. I try to relish the pain, try to delve into it and capture it. I want to feel something, but it is getting harder every day. I am glad the days are ending.
I cried the day I could no longer feel our love, but only remember it. I thought I would go insane, but my will is too strong. Now I remember images and voices, touches and sensations, but they could have been somebody else´s. Something I had read in a book.
I remember our love. I know the words to describe how you made me feel, what you meant to me, what we knew in our hearts, but I can no longer feel it myself.
Ever since that day I have been waiting for this day when they would come and take me away, before I lose the ability to feel pain over what I have lost.
I would wish everything had turned out differently. I would wish I had had the privilege of watching you age, just as you promised I would. The one promise you couldn´t keep.
I have hated you for that. I hated you for a long time, but not anymore. The feeling of hatred has become as elusive to me as the scent of your hair.
I pray I will get to see you again. That I will get a chance to explain to you why I gave up one night, a night no different from the hundreds of nights before I had spent in this prison. The truth is, I didn´t see it coming and when I noticed; it was already too late.
I want you to know I tried. I hope you will understand my love for you is still there, I just can´t feel it.
They are coming. I can tell from their footsteps that it is the guard with the beard and the one with the crooked teeth. My brother is not among them. Maybe he is waiting outside the chamber.
I can hear the key in the lock and I wonder what will happen to my papers. Whether they will be thrown away or burned. Whether my brother will read them.
Not that it matters.
Prisoner X-1734-57-018
December, 2112