I fell not into death, which would have been dramatic and clean, but into a darkness warm and close as a throat. Down I went among roots and bones and all the unfinished things of the earth, while above me the opening narrowed to a coin of red sky.
I screamed (of course).
I screamed that I had been wronged.
That I had been burdened too much.
That no one had understood.
That I had only ever needed proper support.
That I had almost become something great if not for the endless cruelty of small people with their pebbles and sighs and practical demands.
The dark swallowed every word.
Still, I went on speaking.
I am speaking even now.
For somewhere beneath the hill, in the damp and the black, there lies a man who mistakes his own helplessness for a curse and his own appetite for a wound, and if you place your ear to the earth on certain nights, you may hear him still:
not learning,
not changing,
not risingβ only explaining, forever, why none of it was ever his fault.
