Two

And to be torn from that—

I was torn from that.

I’ve exhausted myself assaulting the wall. When I first woke here, or first remember waking, I could think of nothing but that love I’d been torn from. I threw myself against the wall. Injury meant nothing. Reason’s insistence that my fingers cannot penetrate steel and stone did not slow me. With exhaustion, my body collapsed, and only then did I think to search for a weakness. I ran my hands over the seams in the wall. I probed the meeting of floor and wall all the way around my room. I did it again and again. I shook the door and yelled into the little slot, through which I could feel fresh air.

I do not know how long I have been here. A day? Two? Some heap of hours.

I have only rarely understood who I am.

It does not matter next to the thought of what I have left, what I have been torn from—I have been torn from such love. Such love. Such fullness.

And at the thought of it, I again lose myself. I am again clawing at the door, at the bare walls, as if there were some way to again lay my cheek against the bosom that is all the love of all of humanity over all of history. The full sweetness you would think could never be unless you knew it.