Debris

I sat huddled in the corner, silent sobs racking my body. The cold air rushed against my barely clad form, but the open windows were the only way I had to remind me that I was still alive. My soul was tortured and my heart was broken. I was alone and lonely and my sadness wrapped brittle fingers across my mind.

The blank screen across the room mocked me. No words from anyone in days. Nothing but silence brought about by my own weaknesses. My deepest fear was realized time and again…no one wanted me, for any amount of time. I always fucked up and they always walked away.

There was an empty bottle of wine that lay shattered against the locked door. I didn't know why I had locked it. No one would be coming to see me, to save me. This was my own personal hell, created for and by me. This is where I would live, the monstrosity of pain that I had built on trying to be what no one really wanted.

I had not eaten for days. The hunger pangs had stopped long ago. I was starving, but on many levels which had nothing to do with food. The starvation sank deep into my bones and it would no doubt be what killed me.

A loud clap of thunder shook the walls and sound reverberated inside my little room. It had been raining non-stop, lightning and thunder playing off one another in the distance. Perhaps it was getting closer, the fury of the storm, the wrath of someOne that didn't exist. I craned my head and looked out the window. Water pelted my face in icy sheets. The rain was pouring down heavily and the sky overhead was so gray, so near to black. Was it daytime? Or was it night? I had lost track hours and hours and hours ago.

For moments I sat there as my face was soaked. I no longer felt the cold of it, only a blessed numbness. I turned my face slowly away and opened my eyes. Around the room lay remnants of my life, things that had meant something to me once, things that lay as dead and lifeless as I felt.

My flute lay on the floor, sheet music scattered all around. The memories haunted me. Images of my playing, my total surrender to the power of the notes and the melody brought a fresh rush of tears to my eyes. I had spent many years practicing and perfecting the talent of musician. There was a freedom of expression that had caught me and pulled me in. So many thoughts and feelings were spelled out in little black dots with lines and squiggles.

Sad that I was going to let it all disappear into nothingness.

My books lay in the opposite corner, near the shattered glass of the wine bottle. Dozens of stacks of books…novels, short stories, reference books, journals. I had loved to read. The stories on pages that took me to far off places and filled my mind with dreams and fantasies had been as much a part of me as my music had. Many nights of candles and hot cocoa rested between the pages of those books. I never felt quite so alone when there were unread pages for me to devour.

Some of those books I had read repeatedly. There were passages that were memorized and characters that would speak to me at the oddest of times. Then one day I realized that the characters that were speaking to me weren't from any book or story that I had read, but rather from books and stories that I had yet to write. It was an odd revelation, that.

I had dabbled in writing, in creating my own style of storytelling. I found it odd that my forte and my talent lay in the erotic. I wasn't very experienced sexually, but in my imagination, I was a grand and wonderful lover. In my mind, I surrendered my sexual being to men that craved my submission and my body. Men that wanted total control and power over my thoughts and actions, giving me a sense of freedom and completion that had never before available to me. What I felt and what I saw in these images spilled out, filling page upon page.

Then in a flash it was gone. All of it. There were no more words, no more images, no more dark thoughts of love and lust and the ultimate Domination.

I had been a part of something special. I had come into my own. I had found where I belonged. I had sat in the middle of a garden of decadence and splendor. And then I lost my way. Stepped off the path for a brief moment and all was quiet. All the voices inside my head had ceased to exist and I had fallen. My broken and battered spirit carried me to the corner where I now reside.

I beat myself this time. Whipped and scarred…so much blood pouring from my wounds and mingling with my tears. I was bound, not by nylon and silk as once before, but by my own fear and worthlessness. I no longer fought my invisible prison, finally accepting it for what it was…the only home I'd ever known, the only place in Heaven or Hell or any world in between that would welcome me without comment or question.

The void inside where my heart once beat was now black and cold. My soul shriveled up. My mind stopped. There was nothing left but a shell of the woman I once could have been, if only…

It was then that I heard it. Faint and far away, but there just the same. It was no longer the rain that pelted my ears with it's never-ending cadence, but the strong, technical heartbeat of the machine that had destroyed me.

Through tired and lifeless eyes, I could see the screen was no longer blank. There were words now. Words that sparked a small bit of warmth and a minute ray of hope. Words that were simple and words that said all I needed.

"Hello, My sweet."