"Who am I?" I shout to the sky, hands outstretched in the pitiable display of a wretch.
A sliver of light streams down from a dusty window to catch me in my wild eyes. It pierces my soul like acid, and all my rational thoughts are replaced with an animalistic howl. I crumple to the ground where I stand, my writhing hands clawing desperately at my ears to block out the light.
I am a beast that sulks in the darkness. The shadows are my home where I wallow in sin. Even the smallest glimmer of celestial light causes me to release a blood-curtling scream like the ravage wolf that I am.
The sun, like screeching fingernails on chalkboard, clefts my very being in two with cruel, burning tendrils of fire. The pain is too much. My surrendered body lied convulsing on the cold, stone floor. My legs are clenched tightly to my chest in a primal instinct to protect my racing heart.
To escape the searing needles, my mind flees to blissful emptiness. Here, there are no thoughts. I do not think; I do not feel; I certainly am not masochised by painful daggers of luminessence. Here in my fortified defense, I exist, but I do not love.
From within the white-washed barricade of my carefully closed off conscience, a whisper slips through. I don't know how it has sidled past my carefully constructed walls of passiveness and disillusionment, and yet it persists. It slips under the door cracks, it seeps though walls like a river. I try to stop it. In my room, I am safe. But like a single finger in a bursting dyke, all my efforts are in vain, I curl up once even tighter and watch with panic that matches the rise of the flood that breaks down the last of my paper-thin defenses. The encroaching waters are unavoidable. i hold my breath and take the plunge, expecting icy-cold fingers to leech away my lifeblood.
But the claws of pain never come. Instead, the river embraces me like a comforting hug or warm blanket, and i realize that I have just been rescued from a terrible burden and gained a wonderful peace.
My salty tears mingle with the shimmering waters, and I laugh at how I could have thought of them as anything other than life-giving salvation from my empty shell of a life. Now that the stillness of the river is reflectedin my own concience, I notice a cloud shift and a single ray of golden light reach toward me. This time, the warmth of the glowing strand flows triumphantly through me like warm honey, filling my empty limbs with purpose and the identity that I had lacked. A still, small voice caresses my mind like a warm breeze,
"My child, you are mine."
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