Movement Four — The Shape of the Burning

I should tell you what this place actually is, since I don't think you can properly understand any of what I'm confessing without first understanding where I'm confessing it from.

It does not hold one shape. I want that understood clearly, because I think most souls, hearing the word "prison," imagine something considerably tidier than what actually holds me — four walls, a door, a single unchanging texture to the misery. This place has none of that. It changes, unhurried, without any pattern I've ever managed to properly predict, the way weather changes across a sky that has decided, for reasons of its own, never to settle. Some hours it is lava, vast slow rivers of it stretching in every direction, thick and orange and endlessly, patiently hot, closing over whatever remains of a body the way water closes over a dropped stone. Other hours it is light instead — a light so total, so entirely without mercy, that it blinds rather than illuminates, burning the way the lava burns but from every direction at once, with nowhere left to turn your face that isn't already full of it.

Whatever shape it takes, one thing about it never changes: it is always, perpetually, without pause, burning. I have stopped waiting for it to stop. I think that particular hope died somewhere in the first handful of centuries, the way certain hopes are only ever strong enough to survive a first stretch of disappointment before they finally, mercifully, give out.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I look around me, when the burning allows for looking at all, and I see souls everywhere. Many of them. Faces I once knew better than I knew my own — the man I called husband, back before any of this, in whatever life gave both of us the shapes we wore before we came here; the friends who stood beside me through everything that led us to that terrible, ordinary tavern yard; every single one of the seven who once shared this whole miserable, glorious game with me, now scattered across this shifting landscape the same way I am, burning the same slow, unconsumed burn.

I want to erase them. I want that understood as plainly as everything else I've already confessed. The way I want to erase the women who circle him now, in that gold, gentle meadow I'll never once set foot in — I want to erase these too, the husband, the friends, every last one of them, as though none of them had ever been real at all, as though I had arrived in this burning place entirely alone, with nothing standing between myself and the one thing worth wanting here. I want to be the only soul left in this whole gray, ashen memory. I want that, and I know exactly how ugly the wanting is, and I have stopped, somewhere along the way, expecting the knowing to change anything.