What happens when the condemned are entirely deprived of light? Who says that hearts don't flower and blossom in the nook of palpable darkness and blight?
Amidst the conflagration of rot and mire; there flickers a tender, feeble-flamed ray of affec...
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Trigger warnings- mentions of death, and blood.
Light- a crest of a hilltop. The peak of enlightenment and culture. The cliff of vitality and a source of afflatus for the marching centuries, armoured with pliant protocols and laws. Evangelical angels and curly-headed deities with rose-smudged cheeks. Everything heavenly and exalted is sewn into the composition of light. A brine of knowledge and vigilance, a feeble ray of hope, an unwavering rebirth of notions and philosophies.
In the scientific sphere, Sunlight, the swish of golden drapes, is known to boost a chemical in our brain called serotonin. A shimmering rush of optimism and positivity. A satchel of vitamin D.
The light that revives and rouses, a harbinger of origins and hope. Imagine a civilization of locked people, deprived of sunlight and wading through perpetual days of darkness and soot. Eccentrics sentenced for their eccentricities and prodigies convicted for their esoteric intellect. Where otherness is condemned and homogeneity is revered. Where utterances of poetry and soul are treated as a malaise. Imagine an oppressive system purloining people's liberty and shackling them into an order of living that is problematic and constraining. It doesn't require much imagination to bring it alive inside our heads, does it? History has repeatedly depicted such systems and their eventual ruin. How these systems left behind a path of trauma and havoc in their wake. How these systems impacted the centuries to come and the casualties of their inception.
And yet, humans are fallible creatures. We are creatures of habits and routine. How do you break a century-old habit that has been programmed into you? How do you unlearn the proclamations of tradition that have been passed down to you by the lips of your ancestors? How do you shift a cemented perception in your consciousness? How do you fight visceral intuitions memorised to aid people in the decades of wars and bloodshed? How do you articulate peace when you're hauling the burden of conflicts?
Cell number 26, C wing. Number- 24968AO. Goldfield regional institute was located on a small, remote island called Ember. Cut off from all means of communication and civilisation, draped in a shroud of darkness and conservatism. Located on the outskirts of Europe, people who were found to be 'odd' and 'queer' were immediately transferred to this prison, without a trial or lawyers for the defence. The very mention of Ember island stills the flow of conversation, the ambience turning morbid, countenances of apprehension plastered onto myriad faces.
Prisoners of unspeakable crimes and vices were ushered into the prison, their names and background wiped out from the records of history. Sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and acquaintances- ordinary people with unconventional perceptions about love were labelled as felons and they never returned. Censored lines of a newspaper. Blank spaces between the verses of a poem. Untold stories.
Jude Evans slumps in his unmade bed, blackened coverlets and minuscule smudges of blood. A plate of food cools beside his feet, rotten and sour-smelling. Insects crawling across the rim of the plate and buzzing above the slices of food in dizzying rapid circles.
A guard in an ink-blue uniform unlocks his cell and wordlessly motions him to accompany him. Stepping away from the spray of the monotonous, grey light; he feels slightly relieved. As though discarding a particularly sweaty jacket at the end of a tiring day. An array of vast, unbroken cell blocks greets him. Person after person, either driven half-mad or in various stages of blight. Cackling hysterically, hunched under a dark alcove of the room and sobbing, smacking bloodied fists against solid walls, spewing insults or sexual innuendos at his passing figure, beseeching earnestly to be released, puking, smirking with a murderous glint in lifeless eyes- he realizes they were all once kind people. People who loved someone. People who fetched flowers for their partners at weekends. People who went on dates. People with passions and careers. Condemned for loving the wrong person.
This was just the C wing, though. There was something called D wing. Where no visitors or prisoners were allowed. Guards in black uniforms with body bags and towels visited the D wing once a week. Sometimes doctors and nurses in pristine white coats and syringes strolled out looking sick and nauseous. Where people were no longer people.
He happened to steal a glimpse into the D wing once. Murky, voiceless cells, static shadows of people. Charred humans, wrists sizzled into feeble sticks. Ribs probing through skins, bald heads, empty sockets and slashed lips. He smelled ash, a blaze of fire, the burning of body bags and skin, seeping through the barred windows. He felt ill. My life, he thought. This is what my life has been reduced to. Gloomy days devoid of sunshine and swarming with maladies. The life of the 'queer.'
Sometimes when he couldn't sleep at night, the wails and guttural howls of his cellmates, tugging the sleep out of his eyes. He muses of a better time. He was a painter. An artist. He remembers sketching the sharp jawline of his lover, lounging on a dew-smelling turf, April winds stirring the long-repressed desires of his heart.
He remembers his lover asking him, in that husky; sultry voice of his, "Jude, do you think we can ever be happy in a place like this? Do you think one day I can openly kiss you in public? I'm exhausted, Jude. Do you think happiness was for someone like us?"
He remains mum. His lips sealed tight. Pencil stilling in his grip. Questions that he didn't have the power to answer. He wishes he could've told Tommy that he loved him more often. He wishes he would have visited him often. He wishes he would have proposed to Tommy. He wishes for many things. But for him, wishes remain unfulfilled.
As he's dragged into D wing, two beefy guards haul him off his feet, clutching him under his armpits. He thinks, "No, perhaps happiness wasn't for us, Tommy." He wishes to see Tommy one last time. He wonders where Tommy is.
A half-zipped body bag passes him, the glint of an emerald on a tattooed neck, and then it's zipped close. Tommy. He remembers gifting Tommy that emerald studded pendant. He remembers deciding to have matching tattoos with Tommy. His fingers brush against the half-tattooed colour of a flag. Pride flag.
He screams and struggles against the guards, yelling for Tommy before being latched into a sunless world. That night, he smells one half of a flag being burnt.
No, perhaps there was no room for happiness for the denizens of a grimy world where even sunlight dares not to shine her rays. No, perhaps they were meant for greater things. Perhaps they had to wait for another dust-laden century to roll off the pages.
