Page 68 of Bitter Burn
The tugging is gone; I’ve been tied off. I can no longer move my legs—only my feet—and the empty air beneath me feels like a pit, an endless one, without even plumes of sulfur or lakes of fire to interrupt the nothingness. If I fell, I would fall forever.
The silence is a roar and the shapes behind my eyes are malevolent, and worse, worst, is the air around me, all over me, because I no longer even have the floor to define myself against.
And there is nothing else—no sight, no sound, no scent nor touch—there is nothing else except for me.
I’m the only one here, and I’m alone.
I try to talk over the shriek of fear. I try to remember that Mark and the others are close by and that this is only going to last an hour. But I have no idea how much time has passed, and maybe it’s only been five minutes since the headphones were put on, maybe only a minute since I was hoisted up in the air.
I might only be at the beginning…I might have an eternity left to go. An eternity alone.
This is hell, I think suddenly, with an accompanying inhale so jagged that it sends lines of fresh pain along the ropes of my chest harness. This is hell, to be alone, with only your own mind and your own memories, knowing that most of them hold horrors incompatible with sanity.
And that’s what loneliness really, really is. It’s being alone inside yourself, alone even from yourself, because if your own mind is haunted even for you, how will anyone else ever join you there? How could you ever trust them to understand? How could you ever even try? Mark had carefully tugged me to shore after he found me in the garden, but it’s still there, that dark and endless sea, and I’m helpless to fight the tide.
My shredded inhales and half-choked exhales strain the harness, and each one sends pain—deep and also bright, pushing and also sparkling—burning along the lines of the ropes pressing into my back and shoulders. It’s as if the ropes are soaked in gasoline and every breath is a match brought to the dripping end. It’s fire and it’s also a bruising crush, the kiss of gravity as the ropes dig into my skin, and it’s fear, and it’s the endless sea all around me and inside me where no one can ever get to me and no one wants to anyway.
I don’t realize I’m crying until the tears start sliding free and catching in the blindfold where it lays against my temples. The silk grows wet within the span of only a handful of breaths, making it sticky and cold and unbearable, and I can’t rip it off. I can’t wipe my face. I can’t do anything. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
There’s no way I’m not making noises now. There’s no way that the sawn-off breaths can’t be mistaken for anything other than sobs. I’m so nerve-scrapingly conscious of the soaked blindfold and the ugly, quivering shapes of my chin. Of how I must look like an insect caught in a web, helpless and wriggling and pathetic.
But don’t they know the truth too? Don’t they know that no one can come, no one can drive the shadows back, there’s no escape from it?
It’s truly getting hard to breathe now through the tears, and I’m shaking so hard that I’ve started to sway a little, with a queasy rhythm that makes the open air around me seem even more vacant.
All those people I killed…all those bodies I left cooling in alleys or floating down rivers or burning in structure fires…Mark wasn’t wrong when he said that the world was better off without most of them, but that’s not actually the point, is it? Because who gets to decide what better off means and for whom? The Church? The CIA? My husband, driven as he is by a years-long quest for a revenge that only he understands?
Me, who was willing to follow a lie all the way to the end, all the way to a grave I wouldn’t have seen coming?
I sinned against sinners and somehow sinned against myself too, and now I have nothing to hold on to. My belief in my own righteousness has turned out to be a child’s fantasy; my capacity for love has been spiked all the way through by my gift of annihilation. I cannot claim to be good. I cannot claim to be faithful. I have nothing left.
But—
But something’s different from the last time I felt this. From the last night of Saturnalia or the garden. Because the loneliness isn’t just an idea, not just a vacancy slowly stealing all light and warmth from my mind.
It has a shape tonight; it has a presence. It’s segmented into unforgiving lengths of red rope. It’s clinging to my face as wet silk. It’s the chilly void of unoccupied air around me.
It’s the crawl of dizziness as I dangle, the silence, the silk. It’s real, and it’s here, and it’s touching me, interacting with me. Holding me even, cradling me as I weep in front of hundreds of people who think the worst thing I’ve ever done is run away with a bodyguard.
Mark has shaped a vessel for the loneliness tonight. He wove it out of rope and covered it in silk and washed it in cool air. He gave it a shape and a feeling, knots and tucks, counterpressure and pain to answer the numb indifference.
How lonely am I? Just look at my skin, at the impressions left behind by the twisted fibers. You can measure it in inches. You can trace it from my feet all the way up to my heart.
You are not allowed to slip through your own fingers, much less mine.
I won’t have it, sweetheart.
How lonely am I? Only as lonely as the person who tied these knots will let me be.
How can I be alone when someone will make the shape of loneliness itself for me, twist and hitch it so that I can put my fingers in its wounds and know that it is real, know that its effects can be felt, know that if it has shape and form, then those shapes and forms can be changed? Diminished? Destroyed?
An answering flood of turbulent but indelible joy.
You are not allowed.
I won’t have it.
It’s that easy. Because somehow Mark has found me in the dark and endless sea. He’s swam from his own and survived. He knows my sins and he knows what those sins feel like to carry, and he still believes in a mustard seed nestled safely under curled fingers.
