Free
Barred
The door locks into place. It looks like the wall of bars, if it like this, but it is truth an escape. An unopenable escape made only of wishes.
Around me, I'm suffocated. People, too many to count, press around me and I am suffocating and I am suffocating, but I fight. I fight to the side and they mutter and shoot glances at me but I don't care. My throat is too tight and I need to breathe, I need to breathe so I will fight to press myself against the wall of bars to breathe.
Relief to breathe is overwelming, but soon as the thought comes dread follows on the wings. If I cannot live 5 mere seconds in this hell, how will I survive a lifetime? How will I live here?
Why would I want to live here, in this hell with people, bad people, press all around me and fight and snarl and laugh their ugly laughs that sound, to my ears, like a fingernail scratching a chalkboard. Wouldn't it be better to stay there, suffocated, to die and to not live here, to not live in hell but instead die in hell?
I am a badman, like those suffocating me with their presence. I just covered it with skin and blood and bones and hid it, even from myself. But it came up, it betrayed me and in that act I betrayed myself, thirty-two days ago and that's why I will spend my days in this barred prison, where they stuff all the others that don't have the means to afford a fancy cell with only one roommate. One, not a hundred.
Not a hundred pressing against you in this cell that is not meant for one hundred and they're all dirty and everything is dirty and skinny and bones are poking through pale skin and I don't want to be here, I don't want to be here.
But I am a badman, and so here I will stay. Maybe it is better that I do. Maybe it is better than a badman be caged and die in a cage than more innocents die.
But I can't breathe.
But I will have to manage.
➻➻➻➻➻➻➻
Somehow, in the space of a few hours that seem more like endless days, endless years stretch with nothing to do but suffocate, I was pushed into a corner, the very far corner where the solid wall meets the barred wall. So I sit, huddled to myself, sinking into my brain and refusing, refusing to think about how I am a badman because that will only make the madness fall harder, fall faster than it will if I think about nothing.
So I think about nothing.
But then something, someone, sits next to me and I start and I edge away because in the space of just a few hours, I have learned that someone approaching you is not a good thing. He turns toward me, and as soon as the light, from the windows lining the solid wall and from the windows on the wall that backs the barred wall by meters by four guards, hits his face, I am stunned into silence. Silence, of course, that wouldn't have been broken otherwise.
His hair is dark, the color of the night and the color of the shadows wedged into the far wall, and cut choppily, so it hangs over a single eye. The eyes are as dark as his hair, and deep and rough and sharp and I have never felt so exposed, faced with eyes, before. Permanent black marks frame his eyes, and slither down his neck, elegent and strange and making his pale skin only the lighter shade, making his clear skin so that it glowed softly, so touched by the shadows was he. So sun deprived was he. He moved with a dangerous taunt to his movements, like he would strike you at any second, but there was grace, too, weaved with his anger and fury and unpredict that it seemed they were the same, and at the same time, all the different.
He moved his head so that his eyes were in the frame, but only barely, and his hair shaded his face, for the most part. His knees were drawn up, but only so he could drape his arms over his knees, elbow to kneecap, arms straight and relaxed and strained, all at the same time. He snarled, or at least it seemed like it to me. His teeth are white, burstingly white, the same shade as his skin, striking against his pink lips.
"Newbie, you are?" His voice was deep, rough, twanged with life and sorrow and loss and hardened over time. Or prehaps that was what I was making it to be, so deep into myself I am.
I can only nod. I am too afraid of what this dangerous man wants, of what his motive was to sit next to me and speak to me in his oldened tone.
"I've been here six years, Newbie. If you've get that terrored look from your face, you'd survive all the longer." Here he paused, quick, the strange way that he formed his sentences giving me a hard time unraveling his words. "If you've even the thought to survive here. It might be for all the better if you've keep that terror imprint on your skin and fade in days. Some deaths are better than lives, Newbie. This might be one life that'id be worse than a terrored death. Long and stretching is a terrored life here, and a quick trip to hell wouldn't be bad. Not worse than life here."
I don't know what to say, and the strange man with the tattoos and the twisted tongue and the ear, as I can now see, holed but with no silver to disguise, doesn't seem to expect me to answer. He just sits back, tilts his head to the roof with no sky to see, and closes his darken eyes, and this corner of hell is plunged to silence, once again.
"I am a badman," I tell him, and he cracks open one eye to look at me.
"So you are, if you came here in chains. So you are."
"So I belong here, don't I? It is only right if I do," I say, all the while not knowing why I was talking to this one, why I was talking to anyone.
"You deserve a barred door, maybe. Do you deserve a barred hell?" He says, his deep voice vibrating slightly, like a drum just tapped, with a single fingernail.
"I killed a man," I tell him honestly, but his other eye doesn't open.
"Three man, I killed." I will not move away from this man, because I have wronged like him, and I will not judge him on it even though I should.
And the silence falls, but it is not suffocating and I am not suffocating and that is all I can ask for in hell.
➻➻➻➻➻➻
"What is your name?" I ask him one day, and at first I fear I have gone too far when he turns his heavy eyes to me, and my heart hurts until he soothes my spiking fear.
"Ravi."
"Hakyeon." He thinks for a minute, leaving the edge of the crown of his head against the rock that meets with the bars in the corner than has become our home, his and mine.
"Name that was given by mother?"
"Yes," I say, and with the word comes a rush of memories, happy memories of my mother and my father and my brother. And with the rush comes the guilt, the guilt that I ended a life, that I killed a soul who was too young to did, and guilt that that was not what my mother raised to be. A killed. A badman. And yet it is what I have become, and what I am, and what will shape the rest of my life, when I let my shadow, my shadow with fire eyes and a temper as hot as flame, overcome me, for just a minute.
And I push out everything, because I do not want to feel guilt because it will not help me now, but nothing will, really. Really, my deathbed is etched in stone.
"My name was given to me by the leader." And that's all he said.
➻➻➻➻➻
It has been a year. I would not believe it if anyone else had said it, but when Ravi said it, it is true. A year, then. A year and 32 days since I unleashed my badman and reeling him in too late. Too late.
Less than a year since I breathed, since I stopped my suffocating and I haven't tightened my throat since.
And each day, I settle more, and more. I learn to fight for just enough food each day. I learn when I avoid eye contact, when I stand up and when to stand down. I learn when to grip the bars with whitened knuckles and scream threats and curses at the emotionless guards, which is never. I learn when someone's all the gone, and how to get away. I learn, all too soon, the sight of a dead man before they drag the deadened skin away.
I learn Ravi's name, I learn why he is a badman. I learn his tattoos, and I learn his pieced together words. But I don't quite learn him.
And I still have the will to survive. I am still fighting in this hell. But I have not yet learned myself. But I have all my life to piece my mysteries.
➻➻➻➻
Six years. Six years is a long time. But I am still alive, and Ravi is still alive and that is all that matters. That's all that matters now, when all I have to live for is him and me.
I don't know what is happening, but I believe now that I am meant to be a badman, that I am meant to be this way. Twisted, but I am able to hide it and I hide it well. I believe I was fated to be here, forced here by the hand that controls our fate. We do not control fate. Fate controls us, it controls who dies and who lives and who we love. We are fools to think otherwise, and I was a fool before.
This place, this place meant for less than the number it holds, this place with the bars and the solid walls and the glass, framed with metal and set with rods of steel, has not broken me. No, it has not broken me. Maybe it will, in a month or a year or fifty, but it has not yet and I will fight it, even though I know fighting fate is pointless, I will fight the madness when it descends to take me in its clutches.
It has made me stronger, while the weak man in the middle fights the rising demons, I am learning the man who is beside me, still beside me. He has been here for twice as long as me, and yet he is strong. He is strong, and he hides his everything behind his heart but I am piecing him together in my steady mind.
But I believe when I learn myself, I will learn him, and he and myself are the only myseries, now. We are the only beings in the world. My world.
➻➻➻
It has been too long. Too long, but I am happy. I am happy, even though it took sixteen years.
Love me, you do?
I do.
Heart is telling you, yes?
Yes.
My heart is saying the same.
He is strong; that is true. He is a badman; but so am I. So we are not different. We are different that in he had is grace, his tattoos, his pierced ears where I have skin. But we are not different in our hearts, and his voice, his baring, nothing has changed. And that is what drew me to him, and that is what draws him to me now. I don't think that will ever change.
➻➻
I fear his mind is unraveling. I fear that, after years and years and years in hell, that he is wishing for escape.
I fear he is thinking of leaving me, and I don't know if I can survive here without him because I have never had to but now I fear that I might have to face life without Ravi, without his dark eyes and hair and his speech and his everything. I lived without him when I didn't know of him, but now I cannot last a day and I am afraid for him.
But when he looks at me like that, and his demons retreat for seconds, mere seconds, I have never felt more joy in the world. This is fate, do you understand? It is fate, that the both of us be badman, so we could meet.
He tells me sometimes, in our corner, that he approached me so many years ago, because of my eyes, and the way I looked at those around me, like I was staring at their bared souls instead of what they covered that soul with, their physical appearance. He says that he is glad the mist rose up and there was a gun in his hand at that faithful moment, for he met me. He says that he is glad he survived six years, because he met me, and now, if he goes now, he will at least take with him memories of me.
And I only shake my head, becasue I wish him to not leave me here but I know that is selfish, so selfish, that I would wish my love to suffer in this world more. I know that I will let him go when he wants to go, when he truly wants to go.
I have to, for him.
For the one person, the single person in this world, that I love with all my heart.
➻
He left today. He is gone. But so am I. I choose to leave, 39 years and then some, after I came. I choose to follow him, for if he is not here, than I have nothing. Nothing. And who can live without nothing?
This is my love. This what I feel, this is what I wish, this is what I want? Do you understand? Do you understand, that this is fate, and that there is nothing left for me?
You may think we are horrible people. You may think that no one cared for us, that we are to hell because we killed.
But we are just badman. We are just entwined by fate, just following the footsteps laid out for us. And someone did care for us, because we cared for each other, and that is always enough.
And he is beautiful. Do you see it? Do you see the life in his eyes, even when he has been dead for 45 years in this hell? Do you see the grace in his movements, in the way he stands and moves? Do you see the caring in his heart? Do you see the gentleness in his fingertips, in his heart? Do you believe in him?
If you don't, than that's okay. Because I see it, I have learnt who he is, I believe in him. And he told me once that I was all he needed, all he wanted.
And we, two badman with only fate to blame and to thank, are barred no more.
Comments