“Open your eyes.” Accepted. Seen. Copied. Applied.
I focus my eyes on the white blurry wall in front of me. I hear a hollow sound bursting into my ear. A blank room, not much to say. Dead men’s fingers curl my toes in deep-wrenched waters. “Stop thinking, one last warning,” the automatic voice replies. There are only two rules: don’t think, and don’t even dare to speak.
But I think so much. I can’t help thinking of Adam, now. Or maybe still. I think about the night I was born: the night I was already destined to smirk away my testimony. I remember the sweat on his skin: it burnt like hell. I wish to close my eyes again, copy that. He broke the rules, he thought, he spoke, but he was not blank. He was welcomed with gold; he is the master’s puppet building his own strings. Consequently, nothing happened to him. How was he not punished? He cheats the game, though it was so appealing: a win-win deal to him. So easy to triumph. It is his job: a mighty player, even when his fingers slit along the red chair, the only touchable object in this room. I wish. I wish to untie my wrist bands, I wish to stand up, look outside, jump, breathe. I drench the rosemary petals between my fingers: I want to remember, where did I go? Where did he go? I focus on the empty, rugged, white wall again. In a haze, I remember he muttered a few dull words, thinking about me, perhaps. Thinking about the snake and thinking about his only way to leave this place. But how could he dare to think? Was he ready to leave, to step out of the red chair, and cheat? I simply cannot believe it. And it wasn’t his first time, not at all. He does not care. Not even a blink did he make when I started screaming. It was another world, but with the same unwritten rules. For him it was nothing: modified indeed, but his name has always been written in Hebrew letters on the ceiling. It’s 2126, or 1726. However, there is nothing left but dust and the smell of betrayal, and I have been in his small blank room for centuries over centuries. At least he can see the world or leastwise a glimpse of it, I assume. Maybe it was the ghosts of what could have been that surrounded him, or maybe it was the emptiness of the last cigarette he smoked in hopes of finding anything meaningful. Maybe he was not supposed to see me suffer. Maybe the system is sorry, and he could finally return to me, without worrying about the snake bites which launched me into a parallel future or past. To the downfall of humanity.
I imagine the world more deeply, focusing on the white walls with my eyes shut open, but I don’t see anything else than him. As he slowly lifts his hand out of the water, he thinks about that one time he went to buy flowers and never came back. At least I hope he thinks about it. He blamed me for it, for not waiting at the doorstep in my all-white gown until he was done cheating. We fought all night, he was never worn-out, because he thought it was me who made him cheat. But I am only oblivion: I am nothing but a rosemary. In hopes for change, wherever I might be. That night it was not him who came back, but the snake. It all seems to be striking in front of my eyes. Getting thrown into the futuristic past, again and again. He is a patriarch; he was or will be. He thought he had it all, I assume. Control over me, his wife, a hidden relation with the snakes, and an honest way out. All he sees is cheating, cheating on the system to get back into his time, and perhaps making it out and being the greatest of all time. All times are his. When did my love start grieving, when did he become the system controlling me?
Yet, why can’t I do it too? Why am I forced to stare at hypnotic white cushion-walls and not think when I see it all so vividly in front of me? I feel the water rising continuously, slowly but surely, it’s touching the tip of my hands, forcing the rosemary petals to cling to the surface.
Follow the rules. Follow the rules. Follow the rules, my mind echoes. It was then when a shadow appeared in front of me: “There could have been a way out, if you had not denied me. It’s just us, beneath a little tree. I did not snatch your apple: it was you, but you did not believe me. You could have said you were sorry; you could have been the wife I expected you to be. Yet, you chose it again. And again. And forever, in every following century in which you will be locked in forever, you will choose it again, you will never choose another path than blaming me, Eve, or what should I call you? His, something, Ophelia? If you someday die, it will be your fault.” He yelled at me, and I was not allowed to speak, I was stuck in an infinite circle, a psychotic loop. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. The water rises to my mouth, my roots are implanted in the seat, it was all blank, but I can’t let it happen again, not again, not again. I have drowned so many times already, there is no future ahead of me, there is nothing left. A fierce last word drops from my mouth. “No-”
New rule. Rewritten. Applied. Copied. “Open your eyes.”
Hier geht’s zu den weiteren Member Stories: