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The Sibyl.
May. 11th, 2009 12:01 pmAnd the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unadorned, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.
The last night we spent inside the city of Munich, I did not sleep, but lay stiller than death among the blankets in Isolde's second bedroom. The deafening silence of the walled room around me grew thinner as I listened, the darkness of the shuttered windows fading to grey in front of my eyes. Very faintly, I could hear them breathing in the other room; I could hear the very beating of their hearts, impossibly, through their blankets, through the air and the walls.
The ceiling above me sharpened in the pale light that filled my field of vision, cast by nothing and coming from no direction; not so much light as a simple absence of darkness. Remotely, fear tugged at my consciousness, but I could not grasp it for more than a few seconds at a time. In the stillness, the tiny sounds of the two doctors sleeping in the adjacent room slowed like a clock that has come unwound. The change was almost imperceptibly subtle; a matter merely of fractions of seconds nosing their way into the space between their heartbeats. I must have lay there, motionless and wide-eyed, for a year before, finally, no more heartbeats came.
Such a feeling of empty loneliness overtook me in that utter void of sound that I could not even categorize the feeling as despair. Despair, to me, denotes a loss of hope that once existed in the mind; this thing that hung over me vigilantly was the annihilation of hope's history, as though all up-turned glances had been erased from my very memory.
Finally, I closed my eyes. They grey space in the room around me drew the breath from my body.
The last night we spent inside the city of Munich, I did not sleep, but lay stiller than death among the blankets in Isolde's second bedroom. The deafening silence of the walled room around me grew thinner as I listened, the darkness of the shuttered windows fading to grey in front of my eyes. Very faintly, I could hear them breathing in the other room; I could hear the very beating of their hearts, impossibly, through their blankets, through the air and the walls.
The ceiling above me sharpened in the pale light that filled my field of vision, cast by nothing and coming from no direction; not so much light as a simple absence of darkness. Remotely, fear tugged at my consciousness, but I could not grasp it for more than a few seconds at a time. In the stillness, the tiny sounds of the two doctors sleeping in the adjacent room slowed like a clock that has come unwound. The change was almost imperceptibly subtle; a matter merely of fractions of seconds nosing their way into the space between their heartbeats. I must have lay there, motionless and wide-eyed, for a year before, finally, no more heartbeats came.
Such a feeling of empty loneliness overtook me in that utter void of sound that I could not even categorize the feeling as despair. Despair, to me, denotes a loss of hope that once existed in the mind; this thing that hung over me vigilantly was the annihilation of hope's history, as though all up-turned glances had been erased from my very memory.
Finally, I closed my eyes. They grey space in the room around me drew the breath from my body.