My Inner Forgotten Fortress

“The Walls I Chose”

Are mine to inhabit

I built these walls from silence,

stone by stone of unmet need *

I meant not to punish, but maybe

perhaps just a need to vanish,

but mostly to breathe where no one treads.

The gate is rusted shut with hope and longing,

the moat filled with dreams I wished drowned.

I am not cruel, just weary

of being found.

Let them call it selfish *

this hunger for my own echo,

this refusal to be a mirror

for someone else's shadow.

My soul’s inner forgotten fortress, exists on the misty edges of forgetting and remembering.

The crumbling towers, the moss-laced stones, the sealed gate etched with ancestral runes, amidst the twilight that guards its silence, are mine alone.

I do not want your knocking.

I do not grant you a key.

I want the wind to speak in riddles

only understood by me.

Inside, the rooms are haunted

by versions of myself which I outgrew.

They whisper in the rafters,

“Solitude is truth.”

So leave me in my fortress,

where the ivy writes my name.

Where peace is not a performance,

and love is not a game.

Where my mythical guardian stands *

a sentinel...

keeping others from crossing my bridge.

I need to get myself back. I have become lost in the melee of everyone's insistence on me bending to the traditions and rules of how they believe I should exist.

The room that was once me has been forgotten, making me miserable and wishing the drumming annoyance of the world would just cease to be.

Thank you very mush, I realize that you just have my best interest at heart, that intrinsically, I am being extremely selfish and ungrateful.

But I just want to hear the quiet of my non-visible, blasé, neutral and muted lifestyle where barely anyone knew that I existed.

My phone and e-mail are constantly ablaze with notifications of appointments every week, physical therapy, flu vaccine, MRI, scans for a myriad of, to my mind, unnecessary and annoying tests that I may or may not need. Its like I am a totally different person from the free-spirited sprite that once inhabited my form - running here and there with no second thought to the ache in my feet.

The blasted pills which should heal cause more aches than the initial blasted ache that started this whole conundrum that has now completely locked me out of my own comfort zone.

What has become of the silent, forgotten room where my life was once quiet and at peace.

Where can I find it. I keep searching...it was a selfish room - my favorite room in my fortress of solitude. I offer no apology - I do, however, thank those who are trying their darndest best to try to fix my broken self.

HARK! IN THE DISTANCE - I SEE A LIGHT

I honor that sacred rediscovery - the lost room within, where solitude becomes sanctuary and life becomes reborn:

“I think that I have found The Room I Remembered”

Yes. I have found it again *

the room I buried beneath years of noise,

where the walls still strum

with the songs I forgot to sing.

No one knocked.

No one called.

It waited,

as moss waits for stone,

as dusk waits for stars.

The air was thick with my own breath,

unshared, unshaped,

and I rejoiced *

not for company,

but for the echo of my own name

spoken in silence.

Here, the floorboards creak with truth.

Here, the dust is holy.

Here, I am not seen *

I am remembered.

Do not ask me to leave.

This is not exile.

This is a return to me.

Rediscovery, me, reimagined with radiant ebony skin, standing in the golden hush of my sacred room.

Even if only in my imagination.