A Soul without Windows

My prison has two rooms.

One of them has four white walls with no windows and a floor of Italian marble. This room has a teak bed that creaks, a table with books piled on like skyscrapers reaching for the starless sky of a city, and currently, me. While there are other objects in this room, none are as dear to me as the teak bed that creaks, the table with books piled on like skyscrapers reaching for the starless sky of a city, and, well, me.

The other room consists of a shower, a toilet, a sink. There are other objects in this room. None of them are dear to me, just as the shower, the toilet and the sink are not.

Now, we return to the important room of my prison. The objects that I mentioned as being dear to me, I regard so for very specific reasons.

The bed is an heirloom. It holds my past like a time capsule that none other can open. In each of its grains it holds a memory. It has been passed on through a great many generations of my family, until it is now in this room, here with me. The bed is where I dreamt, you see, and that has seeped into its teak. In my bed, there is safety, there is solace; there is the comfort of things gone by that shall not return. Precious and sometimes ugly stones in the rough ground and polished by the wear of time. This is the bed in my prison.

 

Now we come to the second object in this room. You see, reading, to me is like breathing. No, not because it is indispensable to the cause of keeping me alive. Well, it is, half the time. What I mean though is that often it is something I do out of habit rather than of desire. Every thought that went into the writing of a book becomes fuel to the engines, and the trains of my thoughts move along the tracks anew. That is just the way it has been, is, and will be. The table holds my books as it has done for a long time. It bears the burden of their weight, as do I, and when I do so indifferently, I find the kinship I share with the table. This is the table in my prison.  

When you read this, you will perhaps wonder of the other things that I have in this room, the room of importance. What of that glint of metal you see there, in the corner of the room, isolated and shunned? Yes, that is the key to my prison, and yes, the door is locked from the inside.