A Room Without A View (Summer 08)

Anonymous

I couldn’t adjust the light fixture in my room; the beaming white light always forces me to look down at the ground. Looking to my left, I could see a plain, off-white wall. There were no corners. To my right was a round window ten feet above the ground. Ahead of me I could see my legs planted to the ground with toes tucked in to avoid the shadow.

Right below the window was a ladder covered in cobwebs. I didn’t know how it ended up there and I didn’t care to wonder why. The vague memories of me trying to climb it for a peek out the window have been fading; but the ladder was too short.

It’s been years since I’ve been able to stand. For the past five years, my bowels have been floating inertly, with gravity cradling them however it pleases. When I try to stand, pain consumes me. Like a vice, it reminds me of my condition. I’ve never been able to manage to loosen the cilice. There has been too much uncertainty, absurdity, and unpredictability for me to use any laws of logic or probability to foretell my transience. There are certain laws I will never accept, but my covenant with nature is irreversible. Nevertheless, I will never cease to repudiate any intuition of death.

How much I pitied those who forfeit to the laws of man. Those who so credulously give in to faith and unknowingly concede perspicacity never come to understand their integration into the fluidity of sophistry. They don’t know what death is.

If only the world could be as weightless like my condition renders me- bound by no obligations, free to form, free to die. I refuse to surrender to the sphere of naiveté.
Ivan came up to me asking me to lay back and drink some opium. After some time, the pain was still there. I swore to end my life at that moment. With gaping eyes, he looked on. There was no conceit to my words.

In my dying hours I remembered how I never got a chance to see anything in the window from the ground except for the clouds shrouding it. When the tempestuous waves would finally settle, I begrudged at their departure.

My condition worsened and the cancer engulfed me in the repast. The suffering didn’t halt for a single moment. My brother knew I was dying. I winced in embarrassment whenever he delivered his pitied looks. I declined any visits by doctors. They couldn’t do anything and they knew it. This was my responsibility. I gripped my brother’s shoulder subconsciously asking him to forgive me, but I meant for him to leave me. My prostration caused me too much pain to be considerate of my words. Language was morbid anyway.

Where was the pain? There, there it was.

And the death? Where has it fled? Where has my fear fled?
There was no death, no fear. Death has ended. I rolled to my side and fell through.