The Cell

I can just make out a glimmer of moonlight through the crack in the roof.
Tonight is a good night. Tonight I won’t have to sleep in the total darkness that usually swallows up my cell. Tonight I have a guardian; someone to watch over me in this increasingly dark place.
I wrap my arms around myself, a vain attempt to keep warn in this frozen land. As usual the cell floor is cold and moist and somewhere nearby I can hear the sullen drip of water running. When I first came here that sound nearly drove me to madness. But over recent times I have become accustomed to it. I don’t know if I could live without it now.
The only sound that interrupts the continuous dripping is the occasional scuttling of rats claws as they grope around the cells in search of morsels.
This worlds is my prison. This is all there is to it, at least on a physical level. Of course I do still have one escape and that is through my mind. Yes I can be kept here, bound by iron and brick but they cannot keep me from once again wandering over the hills within myself.
The imagination has always been the place for humans to escape to. Books, movies or even stories told by campfire; they are all ways of escaping from the reality of our world.
But in the end they are no more effective than they appear. They are temporary and fruitless. In the end we must return to the real world that plagues us with demons.
Perhaps that is in the end my real prison. There walls can only keep me from going somewhere physically, but it is my mind that truly torments me. Every time I close my eyes my mind take me to the roads I no longer wish to travel. This world, these guards, these walls can only hold me captive so far. It is I that has locked the doors.
It is times like this I know my mind is beginning to slip. Perhaps it already has and I don’t know it yet. There are times when I can see myself as an animal...nay even less at times.
I have begun to lose focus on time. Oh i have the markings on the walls for sure. But there are times when I sleep and when I awake I don’t know if I have been gone for hours or days. Because of the darkness of my cell it is almost impossible to tell when the day has passed.
There is one other thing that picks at my mind other than my imagination and time. Believe it or not but that thing is knowledge. Oh yes, I have plenty of time to think. There is little else to do within these walls. I often used to think of what other paths I could have taken, what other ways I could have gone. But I quickly learned that is the path to damnation. There is no point in thinking what could have happened, only what has.
It is one of the few things that still remains clear in my mind. At times I think it is ironic. Others would think of it as deserved. There is no reason why I should remember it. There is little I can remember when I have had that much in me. But for some reason the drink has not affected my memory of this incident.
It has been a rough day and my business had lost much of its former profit. In other words I had been down the tracks and squandered nearly everything I owned on horses and grog. This was nothing new to me but for some reason this time was different.
I had mulled over everything that had happened that day on the way home in the taxi cab. When I had got out the driver had considered taking my fare from my hide, but in the end decided against it. He knew where I lived after all.
I walked into what seemed like an empty house at first. That was before I heard the scuffling of bare feet somewhere from within and knew that someone else was there.
I stumbled through the house, not caring to put on any lights. I heard that crash from the hallway and made in that direction. I bumped into things as I went, partially because of the darkness, mostly because of the alcohol. When I walked into the bookshelf I felt myself snap. My voice would have carried to the end of the street with ease.
I heard a sob nearby and launched into an attack. The adrenaline was pumping fast now and there was nothing anyone could have done to stop me. Not that there was anyone to stop me.
It was only once I had finished that I bothered to look down at the limp body of the child silhouetted in the moonlight.
I often wonder about fate. Not in the sense of whether I could have taken another path; I know that there is no use in that. But at times it seems as if fate itself is almost a real person. Fate plays with me. Messing about with my mind just for the laugh it gets out of me. The small amounts of light taht are let in during the day. Just enough to remind me of what I used to have and what can no longer be mind. The sounds of the tweeting birds or the smells of spring that can sometimes be caught in the chilling breeze that flows through the gaps in the walls. I have not heard these for a while and I am beginning to forget what they are like.
The guards still know what it is like although I would never bother asking. They have forgotten about me now and to remind them I still exist would be a terribly mistake on my behalf. When I first came here they were full of advice. Mostly on how I could rid them of myself and make their world all the more perfect.
At first they called me names but now I would be lucky to get so much as a glance. I could list some of the names they called me but there would be little point in it for myself. Those names no longer mean anything to me. I have forgotten what they first meant. They are like any name, in the end they don’t truly mean anything. A name doesn’t tell you anything about a person. A name cannot tell you whom a person loves or who loves them. It cannot tell you their hopes, dreams and most inner desires. So in the end what is the point of learning and remembering them? All they do is differentiate one person from another. And for me there is no ‘other’. There are the guards and myself. And the guards do not need names. They are all the same. At first they all bullied me and when they got tired of that they left me alone. There is no reason for me to try and tell the different between them.
They still believe that a name means something. But in the end they are like everything else. After a time they crumble and die leaving only a memory of what they once were. And even that will fade in time...