A Heart Divided

The house is dark and silent. The doors are locked, the windows darkened, and it's difficult to gauge how early I've awakened in the resulting abyss that swims before my opened eyes. This darkness that surrounds me is absolute. Not like the dimming of the sky as the day progresses, or the arrival of the curfewed night. This inky blackness seems to stain me with its weight. So complete I cannot fathom any source or degree of light that might be capable of piercing through.

Phantom images begin to slide across my periphery; imagined figures with hateful, hungry eyes. They approach me, stepping softly with their arms outstretched, and I can almost feel their breath upon me. Sense the nearness of their grasping fingers at my throat.

I yearn to flee, to leave this bed, and house, and all those with condemning eyes, but know that I cannot. The locked doors will not unlock for me; light will not fill the room for me. The sensors, timers, and-- by extension-- me, are all beholden to another's will. So, instead, I shut them out, closing in around myself so my knees are at my chin, and my fist is wrapped protectively around the trinket hanging from my neck. I shouldn't have it, shouldn't wear it, shouldn't cling to it like this. The Gospel that protects our Peace forbids such things. Indulgent. Frivolous. Selfish.

By keeping it I prove myself these things. I have accepted this reality, for I cannot bring myself to dispose of it. Because, though deviant and other, it does more than just comfort me, it reminds me of her.

And, as though responding at the thought of her, sunlight floods in through the glass.

An overhead display begins to flash, intending to awaken me.

My relief is palpable. I release my vise-grip on the locket and inspect the heart shaped indent left there on my palm, but not for long. Sensing my weight still laid out on the mattress, the bed begins to quake in short and urgent bursts.

I step down, cutting off the tremors and the strobing of my bed.

As always, I kneel before the altar of the Gospel, but today I do not plead forgiveness for my hubris. I do not ask for strength. I do not thank its mercy. Today I only kneel.

As always, I wash and dress and groom.

As always, I cloak my skin in coverings of gray and place the barcode tags above them. They provide identity to my otherwise obscured and uniform appearance.

But today feels different somehow.

I feel different.

I uncover the locket from beneath my wrappings and my tag, and remember her again.

"Lisa," she'd called herself, indicating my barcode, so I'd understand she was identifying herself as her hands gave shape to the sound that echoed from her lips. Where her own tag should have been, a heart-shaped locket hung in its place.

The same locket.

It's been months now since she's blown in and out of my life. The fire had come flying through our orchards too fast to save me; a wall of flame that had cut me off from the retreating group. The heat of it had been consuming, but more than that, the sound. A roaring beast that swallowed up the air, the sky, and the Gospel's Peace and Silence.

It was insatiable. The heat and light was blinding, and yet my vision began to dim until there was only darkness left. I knew I'd been devoured then.

When she'd pulled me out that day, I thought that I'd been wrong, but thinking on it now, I'd been right: a part of me had died that day.

Under her care my burns had healed, but without my coverings I'd felt as exposed as the raw skin beneath the bandages. I'd longed for the comforts of the Gospel, haunted by the ghost of the me who'd perished in the fire.

Now, I long for the life I'd been reborn to. I remember the assortment of color and pattern in her garments, the unshaved length of flowing hair, plaited neatly over her shoulder. I remember her sound. A sin that cut through Silence and called attention to an individual.

Lisa, I mouth, feeling the shape and weight of sound atop my tongue, but still afraid to vocalize it.

"Come with me." she'd said, hands trailing after the sounds from her lips again.

But I hadn't. I'd come back, chasing the security I'd known in our Gospel. Seeking the certainty it provided with our Peace.

I found only shadows of these things.

She'd split the locket on her neck and draped the chain around me. Then slowly and deliberately, she shaped the words, I won't forget you.

Standing here now, my coverings no longer wrap me in their safety, our Silence doesn't comfort me. I feel strangled, suffocated... terrified.

The house unlocks the doors and the lighting dims to warn me to depart, and I make a choice. Perhaps my first if I'm honest with myself. I leave the locket out, I remove the coverings from my head, and I depart.

Depart the house that's become my grave. Depart the Gospel and the Peace that it protects. And depart from certainty to face what's sure to be an end of one kind or another.