Redemption

Sunday #2

I have been indulged in recollections for the past couple of days. My memories were tributes. For the ones who offered their lives for my soul, I honored their noble sacrifices composed of mere images, moments, and flashbacks that even for a mere second filled my untenanted heart with youthful passion and meaning. The faces, the presence, the eyes filled with unbridled emotions, the eyes I saw, and the eyes they saw.

I remember. I remember them all.

I remember the days before my childhood's end when all I had in mind was a small motivation. I was thirsty, and all I desperately desired was to quench the craving.

Consequently, 'pattern' became an unnecessary luxury. To 'follow my heart' – my father always told me, and I bore his mind in the depths of my heart.

No... In fact, I was only curious. I didn't know how to resist the urge to know. It seemed like an insignificant change, an inconsequential ripple to create. It was one of the options that enticed me to an inescapable path, and it became the option I chose to take.

It soon became the one thing my fingers remember. As attempts were made and time flew by, the act no longer became a method. When the deal was made, my hands craved for salvation, my spirit desperate for a deeper meaning.

The process was quick – I have to admit. And it was only during my second act when I chose to comply with the need to follow a pattern.

This was how it went: I murdered a man. But I naively omitted the possibility of a nearby witness. A bystander, a woman, saw the man with his head hanging down from his shoulders.

I was too slow to stop the noise from being heard. She had to be stopped, and I did what was so painfully necessary.

At the end of the day, her blood gave burning colors to the room, not the man's. Her head was almost fully liberated from the body, leaving the flesh sinful and besmirched.

I learned that emotions were not limited to that sense of completion it gifted me. Wrath, anger, and fear bubbled deep, boiled to the top.

Anxiety. I had never seen what I have seen that day in amid that room of blood.

But on the bright side, I finally learned. The urge soaring to the heavens from within had no feasible restrictions I could place thresholds upon; as high and wild as the temptations were, I learned how much I was afraid of certain revelations occurring that would deem me guilty.

The truth was painfully unsatisfying to admit. But denial hardly ever helped.

Now I was aware of the consequences of my actions.

An eternity has passed ever since, but the image from the day has never been clearer.

On the day that I was closest to failure, I heard the woman cry. She did not ask for mercy but a mere hint of a second chance that all of us were in need of.

If only she was a minute late for her work, and if only she had children to pick up from school. This would not have been the destination, and this wouldn't have been the remorseful demise.

She managed to give an attempt to rise even when blood was ever busier being pushed out of her dying vessel through the dozen holes pierced to the core. When her hands turned bare and the legs colored red, I saw desire flashing within her eyes just as strong as what I had possessed.

She shoved me away when her head was halfway separated.

To grant her peace and silence, I veiled her eyes. My fingers bestowed deception, ignorance, and blindness, her eyes hushed in composure, a pathway to an insignificant moment of respite.