The Judgement

And as the night cast its dark shadows on the world, he was left lying in his bed, contemplating the skies. At that very moment, flashes of that scene came back to him:

A giant courtroom, filled with anxious people anticipating what seemed to be the ruling of a sentence.

In the front of the room was the panel of judges, each looking to the next in agreement. The decision, as it seemed, had been made.

At the back were heard waves of whispers mixed with vivid chanting, as the crowd persecuted the criminal with their words.

What remained of that room was nothing but an empty void, except in the center, where a broken man stood motionless, his head facing the ground.

He looked like a shadow of himself, a fallen warrior, a man who had missed some part of him �" or lost it.

The judges shot him down with each glaring stare. The ruling was unanimous: he had been found guilty. ‘Guilty of what,’ he asked himself.

It was one of the questions that would be left unanswered in his life.

He twisted again in his bed. As the night grew darker, he became more anxious. He remembered being escorted to his jail cell. A helpless figure, but he couldn't feel the pain.

He had become numb, immune to the world surrounding it. And as the people tore him down, his numbness grew and built an impenetrable fortress that would keep him forever away from them.

Inside the cell was nothing but four walls separated by darkness. He had taken habit in spending his time in the shadows, as he found them playfully amusing and thought of them as a shield from the outside world.

He waited in the cell, motionless, the echoes of the damning public screeching in his mind. And as he awaited his final sentence, his heart was restless, beating and pounding down his chest, as if it were fighting it.

He had found the spirit of the fighter. In the middle of the courtroom, amid the provocation of the crowd, he had found the warrior’s way. And as the outside fury continued to make waves in the cell room, he entered a different state of mind; he heard cheers, acclaims of joy and adulation in his head. A tender smile widened his face for the first time.

He closed his eyes. He was back in his bed. He stopped to observe the silence. Then, carefully laying his head on his pillow, he thought to himself ‘This is it’. He was back in the cell. Numb, stiff as a stick, observing his surroundings. Then, he noticed something strange, something different; the agitated screams of the crowd were no longer as loud. Rather, they were mute sounds that soon turned to whispers. And as the winds of the night carried them of, his time had arrived: restless shattering of the cell lock opened his eyes to a new reality:

The doors were opened, and into a dark path he went. Would it finally be the path that would liberate him and give him freedom? Or was it the sentence that would make him pay for questioning the system and fighting it?

Strangely though, he wouldn't fall for that illusion. For this time, and for the first in many, he wasn't standing at a crossroads; he walked in a clear path, following a clear direction. Where it would lead him was still an uncertainty, as his path was far from drawn, only his heart kept beating, pushing him forward to go all the way, into a pleasant unknown he would later call ‘home’.