"If all your world is dead and gone, unchanging with the seasons;
To want to go on living then, one must find their reasons."
- JoMo 3:14

In misery, he falls to the ground. Tears seem to seep out of his weary eyes, as he scrapes, drags, and lurches his broken, bloody shell of a body across the rocky road. The ominous gates stand tall behind him, their cold blackened iron depths forgiving none who pass. As they slowly close, he feels the echoes of their bolts locking tight reverberate throughout his foresaken bones. One muddy finger rises to wipe away the wetness on his eyelashes long enough to take one final look back inside. Row after row of tombstones stand still in the driving rain, guardians of lives he never knew. Mimicking his falling tears, the water splashes hard against the cold granite of each stone. With one last stuttering breath, he mouths one single word. "Goodbye."

Do you know what it's like to have to remind youself to breathe? I choke if I forget, like my body knows that I don't care anymore and doesn't even try. I lay on the road, desperate to block out the thoughts that hammered like sharp thin nails into my brain. I felt the kind of loneliness that squeezes your heart and numbs your bones, and it wasn't that I'd never find happiness again, it was that I didn't care because I'd forgotten what happiness felt like. I heard someone screaming in pain and torment and looked around, only to find myself completely alone. I wasn't scared - if you're ready to die, you're not scared of anything. The rest of your life is simply the gate before the ultimate freedom, and it doesn't really matter who leads you through.

The screaming continued - and it sounded like someone's soul being torn in half - and then I realized it was me screaming. The rain stopped, and my tears stopped, and suddenly silence came crashing down, drowning my screaming as if my head was held underwater. Everything was thickly still except for my mind, which squirmed like a worm in the apple of my skull. I struggled to my feet, needing to get away from this place. I took one look back - knowing I shouldn't but NEEDING to - and then I forgot to breathe, and the nails pounded and the worm squirmed and the road rushed back up to meet me.

Sonnetts, hours, oceans, epics, universes later, his eyes fly open. The brown, muddy road lies inches from his brain, as it should be. His muscles and bones and nerves with all of their sinewy, synaptic depths quake and quiver as he opens his mouth and oxygen floods his lungs. Like a thick molasses sludge, he slowly rises, his body a lithe, towering mass in the middle of the long, winding road. Step by step, his beaten body surges forward, leaving a trail of connected footprints in his wake. With each movement, the bones that are broken creak and scrape, drawing fresh blood to add to his already soaked clothes. As he staggers forward, images...no, real...buildings begin to take shape, amassing in grey blocks of despair. None stands whole. All are ruins - blasted, bombarded, decimated, and destroyed- these buildings have fallen...as has he.

As my gaze slithered over all that was left, a black wave of loss drove me to the brink of insanity. Broken stones jutted from the dark ground like rotten teeth in black gums. A glint of silver caught the cold moonlight, and I saw in the wreckage a shattered picture frame. Thoughts of what I had left in the graveyard ambushed my swollen mind, making my skull ache with equal parts mourning and madness. Hot tears poured from my eyes as I begged myself to forget, but the memory burst through like someone crushing an egg in their fist. I remembered what I had done, the horrific decision I had made, and felt my heart shatter in my chest like fine porcelain. I was already dead inside and nearly dead outside. I couldn't tell you what I felt, because I didn't feel anything anymore. I was just looking for the perfect place to die.

The air reeked with the rank stench of death. It was so thick, it seemed to be smearing a hefty, oily coating of pungence on the wind. His fingers rolled up into his palms, digging deep, forming fists clenched so tightly the skin was translucent straight through to the bone. His eyelids grew heavy in remembrance, but he forced them open, searching...always searching. He passed sunken building after building, each wreckage a testament to his betrayal - to his hell. Faces, pale and deathly...deadly...materialized out of the rancid mist. Their skin was a mottled, rotten flesh, draped loosely over old skeletons. Long, bony fingertips rose to tap impatiently on the cold stones of the buildings. For as far as his blurred and bloodied eyes could see, they arose, surrounding him with a death unmatched by any graveyard. The death pervaded his senses, encompassing him and the surrounding world entirely. Nothing stirred in this barren wasteland. If there had been flies, they would have feasted on the mutilated carcasses of those that stood before him. As it were, only their faces, marred by empty, sunken eye sockets, moved- turning to stare...and condemn. At last...he is met with his jury.

They had finally come for me - the ghosts of my past. I was surrounded by horrifying, ghastly, deserved wraiths made corporeal by my failing mind. They drifted closer, and I felt my skin crawl and my lungs corrode as I moved among the ranks of the dead. Their eyeless gazes tore into me like bitter fangs, impossibly realizing who I was and hungrily drinking in my guilt. I was being judged, and like a murderer found drenched in his victim's blood, I knew there would be no lenience. As I staggered along, my broken bones grating, my wounds leaking crimson with every heartbeat - my terror was tempered with the weary knowlege that my journey was almost over. I think I'd always known that they'd come back, that this would be the consequences of my actions and the debt of my mistakes. Then I saw it, looming out of the dark, and I knew I was almost there.

Their yowling, shrieking voices demanded blood. Knowing that which already soaked his skin was nowhere near enough, he raked his fingernails down his cheeks, his arms, his legs. Deep ridges filled with separated flesh and fresh blood. In his right pocket, he felt the weight of the picture frame, that single snapshot of his happiness, and grated the metal edges across his skull, filleting open the flesh until it hung in wet, dripping flaps. The glass shards he used to dig deeper into his aching limbs, severing tendons from the bone, one by one. His actions were frenzied, mirrored in the pool of viscous sanguine liquid below. Like a razor, the frame slashed through his body, decapitating all but the one thing he wished to lose...his memory. It eluded him cleverly, seeming to know that until it was gone, he would be forced to remain living...to remain...unresolved.

Behind them, it growled with its growing tenacity, snarling, feeding off of his unending desire to die. Looming over him, it snaked tendrils of darkness out to poke at his brain, screaming unbearably for him to remember, screaming and screaming and pushing and pulling and he was bleeding and falling and their hands pulled as they came for him, mouths opening, he screamed they tortured murdered mangled please die please die I want to die and then...they were gone.

A simple flutter and he was alone. Floating, softly as a feather, he watched the photograph alight ever so gently on the ground. And there it was, a thousand words of torment more painful than any open wound. It was what he left in the graveyard and the only thing he wanted. His happiness. It was more than smiles and love and friendship. It was everything. He exhaled, shoulders sagging, and dropped to the ground, grasping it in one hand, leaving a trail of bloody fingerprints. As the tears fell, as the unextinguishable pain soared through his veins and out the raw wounds, he watched it crumble into ashes, and blow away.

The dark forms were gone, and as the shadow ebbed away like a thick black tide, I forced my dimming eyes to study the photo in my hand one last time. How it had arrived here I did not know, but it had saved me from the darkness, and the madness. Things could not be undone, but I had at last found peace, the sort found in the face of man who expires quietly in his sleep. I had left a graveyard to find a place to die, and I had finally found that place. As I lay there with my torn cheek on the cold ground, I could hear the last of my blood trickling out of my veins and seeping into into the hard ground. I made an effort, and the last breath of air sighed out of my lungs and past the last smile I would ever make. And as my eyes slipped closed one final time and the darkness rolled down like a black curtain, I knew I was finally free.

"If soon their reasons are not found, all they have is sorrow;
Their soul may wander far and wide, but never see tomorrow."
- JoMo 3:14