The Shadow Girl's Story

We all stepped out of the void, and to the void we must return…

I awaken in the shadows at the corners of the garden. I awaken in the darkness between the petals of the dying rose. I awaken in the gloom at the back of your mind when, at four o’clock in the morning, you wake suddenly: your heart pounding and your breath coming in short and desperate gasps, while your lover slumbers selfishly beside you.

These places are my home.

I am fear. I am the crippling terror that sneaks and skulks the wind-ridden trees. I am despondency. I am despair. I am the wall of darkness: the moment of dread on the edge of the abyss that comes with the final, breathless seconds of consciousness and life.

I have been tricked into this garden – this awful, painful place. And now the whole world hurts me.

When I rise in the morning, the smell of rotten flowers suffocates me. The hateful sunlight pains my ice-frosted eyes to tears, and I must raise a languid hand to shield myself from the pain and anguish of it all. It burns me. It tries to roast me in my skin and leave me here: nothing but a desiccated husk, a memory of life among the sugar-rotten roses.

I long for nighttime, for its careful, considerate silver light that touches without burning – like pale, rain-waxen flesh against my own.

When I sleep, I dream of the purity of deserts: the red sands wrought rose-silver by the moon, the wheeling heavens vacant and inviting high above me. I ache for the silence and the clarity of things that exist in the static-singing space between that which lives and what is dead: the viscous-growing cacti; the vultures, and the solemn-sung coyotes that feast on what is passing…On what has now all ready passed. Things that make their lives from death.

I yearn – like a young, naive girl may yearn to have her lover – for the distant, storm-raked mountains, where wind howls and rain crackles like dead leaves. Where the chill is absolute and crippling, and the only echoes left of life are the calcium-wrought fossils of the things that come up here to die – their hollow sockets staring blankly without feeling, reflecting what is yet to come… The windows to an extinct soul.

The crow croaks hoarsely with regret…

The thunder rolls…

My thoughts so often wander out of this torturous existence of noise and of decay and of painful, painful sunlight, struggling away from the shackles of existence and drifting like a ghost (Oh! What wishful thoughts those are!) down to the ocean, where the thunderous waves wear the whole world slowly down to dust. Where the white gulls scream and cry and wheel like falling angels. Where life is arduous, and hope is hard to come by. Where the heavy stamp of our mortality is pressed down hard in every single stone, and carved into the stormclouds with a bloody, rusted knife.

I dream of these places, but dream is all that I can do – chained down with ropes of flesh.

We all stepped out of the void… Only I can know how much it wants us back.