Lost
His body…His body was hanging as though he he had been lynched. Everytime I close my eyes…I can see him. His body swinging slightly, stiffly, and the air around him was gray. It was as if an Angel of Death had dropped a canvas of mold, delicately intercrossed with frigid air that encased him. I wanted to save him. I wanted to scream and tear at my eyes, burning with hate, with a fastidious malice. But- I couldn't move. Below my neck, heaving like an arrow shot into my heart, I felt it. The Terror.
I had seen dead people before. I didn't know them. I didn't love them. Pity, certainly, I had felt pity for them, but they were just bodies. As long as it wasn't me in that casket, they were just bodies. You see, they weren't…they weren't really people. I only thought of them as bleeding silhouettes. A screaming shadow in the night; It's cry was harrowing, but certainly not worth a second listen. A last breath was breathed unnoticed by my torrid ignorance.
Yet, he was not a shadow. With him, I had shared things I wouldn't dare share with anyone else. He was real, and hovering so unbearably before me. A Love, now hung in a ensnarement of ropes to forever hang like a cruel joke; A grotesque testament to the wonders of folly and destiny.
The truth came out two seconds too late.
The ropes holding him so expectantly, crumbled. He plumetted, and hit the mud and grime with a soft thump of lifelessness. I untangled the massive series of ropes from his pale and dirtied limbs, all the while crying forlorn tears. I gently untied the black shred of cloth that had been tied over his eyes, a makeshift blindfold. He was…
As soon as I saw him, as he lay unmoving in my arms, I felt myself go hollow inside. My head seemed inflated with silly things like thoughts and words that I knew wouldn't change anything. I remember…I saw it all inside the shell of a person I had always been. I saw it, the walls to my fortress erode and decay, much like my faith.
Everything was blurred to almost unrecognizable features. Everything was gray and the vacant space inside stretched on forever. His face was mildly bruised, with no sign of his usual debonair happiness on it. It was if his face had been wiped clean of any other emotion other than confusion, pain and sorrow. The remnants of who he was still clung to him, although the struggle was in vain.
I was dead. Living is not feeling as though you are a pebble in the road of Black, and behind him, sitting on a dark steed was…
I don't think I was breathing. Is there any such thing as breath in Purgatory? For that was where I was.
I knew he was gone before I accepted it. How do you accept something so cruel? You cannot. I cannot. We cannot accept death when it strikes someone so near to us. What could their life have amounted to? They could have-
As with my knowledge of him being gone, I also knew I could not stay there forever before I believed it. But They came, with their shackles and guns, They had killed him. As They chained me up, I pleaded with them to kill me too. They said nothing, just lifted me from my knees and took me to Base. They were not people, They were beasts, changed by this place, by themselves. And I could feel myself changing too.
END