Impulse, but did it help?

Her eyes were wide with the streets, pupils narrow with the dislike of wet and cold and damp, of hunger and thirst and the clutching of a drum stomach and throbbing heart. Wanton was our path, in all manner of disarray and strife. I searched for day break yet found no golden threads spilling over the horizon, save for the golden spilling of her hair in the light of many streetlamps we passed under and over the puddles reflecting their rays. She was clawing so desperately at my wrists and forearms, at my knees and bloodily stamped toes, bringing despair and doubt into every pore of my being, yet she also held me fast in such disgust at her surroundings into which I had led her astray. She met no one but me that night, and she shrieked upon seeing a me outside the court, outside the gilded gates of the ancients’ well-breeding and carefully tailored, manicured etiquette.  She screamed and ran away from me, ran with me, ran toward me, as if I were the horned demon she had fed her imagination to.

Morning would never come. No valience or morality was to be found in the men that offered to save her, no more than there existed shining armor on their deprived bodies nor stallions of their own in the stalls they slept in and gorged in and wasted in every day of their lives. As time passed, no one would approach the whimpering, disheveled mess of a witch I had caused her to become. Their eyes possessed fear, but no such fear as was in her own pupils. She was unrecognizable. The palaces would have thrown her out without a secondary glance.

I brought her insanity.

And for that they caged me. As I sat in the crypt they drove me into, I felt their hands on my arms again, urging me lower into a deeper burial, away from the noise of the world which still leaked through, into my cell. It was so dark, but I didn’t want to see. A rat’s squeak was left for music, and the groans of the city overhead, as it seemed to move in the night and tremble from supporting so many streets unwalked.

No company, but for my own silly thoughts. A loneliness sat beside me, and my stomach acknowledged it simply in the growl of a lone, bag-o-bones dog. For this I wept, for my body was such that it twisted my mind into wanting only food, only that carnal pleasure of wetting one’s mouth after a few hours. I needed no humanity to look upon, to talk with here. I had want of food only, and had digressed to such condition as of a beast gifted with the useless gift of the tongue. For who was there to talk to, down here? One stray individual. In my class, long ago, a teacher would have called his last name first “One,” and then he’d have answered “No,” completing the record with his first name, but “One, No” was such that he would never answer, for he knew, after a while, one’s own mind would have the pleasure of fulfilling that duty, and that fulfiller would soon be so bold as to unceasingly chatter the nights away. It would not end, and all that it took to begin the period, was a stray spot of silence.

For you know, silence remains the loudest sound.