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The night was dark…  the well of light surrounding him his only purchase to sanity. He held his breath with deliberate, quiet care and eased the air out of his lungs when he dared to breathe. His eyes were grainy, everything he could see in the hazy urine yellow light turned into painful sculptures that he saw even when he closed his eyes. Sleep would not come, sleep would not help. If he slept the lamp light and the darkness and the grainy texture of his eyelids waited for him to wake up.

He no longer slept.

He no longer moved. Sweat and the thousand little teeth that were the strands in the rope around his wrists and ankles and his midsection had worked away the skin in those areas until blood actually made his wounds feel better. He lay still, he lay quiet and he counted the seconds since he had last thought of water.
And he remembered how he got to where he was… like a trickle of blood from his wrists the memories came unwanted and stole through the tributaries in his mind and pooled between his shoulder blades as the mighty river of memory made it’s way down his spine and caused him to shutter; the wounds at his hands and feet screaming in protest.

He knew it had been but one sentence that doomed him. It had felt so perfect saying the two dozen or so syllables that had brought about ruin and pain for him, felt so righteous.  It had been threat, warning, possibly a dash of promise but it had come with little thought and great anger. How terribly justified he had felt, protecting what was rightfully his and proudly claimed.

Now, he knew, he should have trusted what should have been a sharing, what should have been a union rather than an ownership. He had taken the path more travelled, why trust what you could control? Why join what you could lead?

The cold at his back and the burning pain in his wounds answered him silently as did the urine yellow lamp light and the gritty, judging darkness. He was weak.