Over my dead spirit
Slavery is the allowance of murder of your free spirit. I can’t shout back at the master, but warn you against them.
Only a madman would like to believe that this room is escapable. I pretend now that I had never tried turning the knobs again and again, trying at the lock and failing. And now that substantial resources are gutted in vain, I sit in the dimly lit corner of this confine and do what I do best.
I write and write to escape. But something about this hellish stench pulls me back as the butcher does to the hen. Frantic for air, I shriek, I plead, and I pray to the entity. But I dare not look behind me. I grapple with the last bit of paper and the feather that has travelled into this room following a strange trajectory. I dip the nib of the feathery quill into the trough of blood that has now flowed beside me. And in my blood, I write the story of my murder.
When I walked inside this humongous hall, with brightly lit corridors and furniture that could speak in the most elegant tongue and lengths about their beauty, I could never have foreseen such fate awaited me. And there was this lady. Posh, elegant and her headdress towering and high. Her magnificence and illuminance commanded the sight of people and bid them to do her work. She had the most formidable aura, yet there was a certain sweet spell bound onto it. A spell that draws you further inside, and within the deep vortex of submission. One that sublimes and eats away your freedom, your conscience and slowly the life essence. She had a thousand minions under her, they looked calm and spoke not a word without a certain consent. They hovered about forlorn, drowning in the ecstasy of their thoughts and the opium of her presence.
She knew all the nerve points. Like a master healer, she was known for all my anxieties concerns and pains. As if they were her people, and who knew, her hamstrings to pull on our minds.
I entered with my consent. For worlds were awaiting me to explore. Worlds I have yearned and honed myself for. Worlds she promised me. But I have lost myself to my base desires and fallen slave to her. My only crime was to be a dreamer and now I recognise my riled fate when for the first time I look back. A monstrous machete hacks through my body, shining in the flickering remnant of what enters from the attic crack. Into a thousand pieces, she shatters it with care and hangs each one up into the air to display like the spoils of war. And in horror, I see the shadowy form of flowing hair and diced limbs, and the pool of blood, like ink, that draws my piece of paper. And it’s horrible to be locked in one’s mind when the door knob would not open. To see one’s free spirit, inner child being chopped up. To hear the echoes of my groans and cries of agony and her terrorising smile, sketch across the walls of my heart and fail to recede. And I have made peace with the door not opening, for my spirit is gone. I write my last piece over the body of my dead spirit. For I too shall cease to exist, when my mind belongs to someone foreign and the heart reigned by something sinister. When freedom passes, I shall no longer be a writer, but a shackled slave. And I know, your prayers and cries wouldn’t penetrate the thick doors, behind which, my dreams are sawed.
~Divyosmi Goswami
