An Assault on the Senses

I awoke when the country was still ripe and untouched. The sun trickled along the crystals of sand that drowned the hills in their subtle secrets. The sand had always been a mystery to me; from a distance, it was just a coat of camel-coloured matter, but when you took it in the palm of your hand and let it fall through the holes between your fingers, you would notice its value.

There were pieces of shells from oceans come and gone, scraps of plastic and little black stones that when magnified, looked like mini meteors. There were also the remains of what I believed to be diamonds, or frozen droplets of rain; reminders that relief and redemption watched from above, waiting for the perfect time to strike.

In moments like these I always tested my senses, so that I knew I hadn’t drifted off into one of my dreams again.

I searched for something real that I could look at, something real that I could smell, something real that I could hear and something real that I could touch. Usually, I could achieve all of them, except for the last. But today, out here, I saw nothing, smelt nothing, heard nothing, but I felt the sand as it left me. It poured through me like the air back home, and abandoned me just as quickly.

That was the only thing I could feel; the abandonment of something I craved and missed, and the sudden loss of breath.

Freedom is tricky, a fickle thing. It is a tree with so many branches, that it almost becomes an optical illusion.

The question is not whether we want freedom or not, but what kind of freedom it is that we want. There are laws in place, to keep us from risking this freedom, but people do so anyway. I’d risk mine and it would never cost me my freedom.

I believe that one freedom does not exist, that none of us have it, unless we have convinced ourselves of it. We have all convinced ourselves that we are free, all of us except those who have run into it like a truck.

Now, rubbing my eyes with sandy hands, I look across my freedom, my self-created freedom, and I miss the time when it didn’t exist; I miss the aftermath of the collision I had with freedom.

The sound of the ocean tapped me on the shoulder, turning me around in a full spin. I saw nothing as my eyes went blank the wider I opened them. I touched the sand again, to check if it was still waiting to carry each step that I took.

It had hardened since the last time I felt it in the palm of my hand, it was no longer soft or comforting, it had been drained of all this by the brutal sun. When a friend of mine told me that the sun was a star I laughed in his face.

I remembered that now because it had been a while since I had laughed. He continued, telling me something about the distance between us and the sun and how it grew hotter each year. I refused to listen because frankly, I did not care enough about him to want to know.

Today, I wished I had listened to his words, because they were the only thing my mind wanted to hear, but I could not even work up the courage to try and remember them.

Silence took over and created a pounding in my head, blinding me further and sending a rush of pain through my entire body.

I still couldn’t feel a thing but the last few pearls of sand slipping through the gaps in my fingers. I thought I had trapped them, but they were stronger than I was.

I had to use my physical senses to get around because my emotional ones had escaped me long ago.

My mother told me many times that crying was not a sign of weakness, but a sign of defeat. That was the first and only time I ever challenged her. I told her that crying was the product of defeat and a natural response as tears soaked my face, making it redder than the sky above us that day. She grew angry, took my arm and looked into my sobbing eyes, and said nothing. Her silence was enough to tear away my ability to cry ever again. That’s why remorse was difficult; I felt that the only way to express it was by crying, but if I could not do that, then remorse was pointless.

Many people called what I was doing, ‘running away’, but that wasn’t it. In fact, I was returning to a place I had never left.