As Vivências

Disguised Freedom Above All [2]

It possessed a semblance of pulchritude, yes-yet the libertas venerated there held a beauty akin to spurious relics: excessively adorned, elevated by credulous hands, and safeguarded by dogmata that meandered from lips like unauthored orisons. It loomed, enshrouded in sanctity and silence, a divine axiom whose genesis none dared further interrogate. Its allure was not an invitation, but an imposition: a suspended altar where reason genuflected beneath veils of purported volition.

Within the bosom of this sect, a singular precept reigned: Disguised freedom above all. This apothegm was hewn into obdurate marble, echoed in choral unison, instilled within the very lactescence imbibed by infants, woven into nocturnal canticles, and embedded within the fertile viscera of the feminine. Liberty presented itself not in its unadorned state-nay, never. It arrived vested in surrender, in liturgical observance, in an obedience so artfully camouflaged that the devotee mistook it for the very stirrings of their own desire.

She, the gravid woman, was merely the most recent voluntary oblation. Or so it had been articulated to her. Her distended womb, taut as a chord before its rupture, bore not solely flesh and sanguine fluid-but the accumulated weight of entire generations who had conflated gestation with salvation. Each uterine contraction seemed to rend from her fragments of a past that no longer held dominion over her. And yet, she offered a smile. The doctrines had inculcated that dolor was a tribute, and tribute, in turn, was liberty.

The sanctuary evinced an austere grandeur: a floor of living stone, a ceiling mirrored in the umbrous sheen of copper, and a solitary, flickering flame at its nucleus-said to represent the "eye of the empyrean," the pure vantage. In parturition beneath this reflection, the mother beheld not her own visage, but the ideal she had been instructed to embody. She metamorphosed into an icon, a stained-glass effigy, a living metaphor for freedom embraced through ostensible self-determination.

Yet, no volition is entirely sui generis when sculpted by the mythologies of another.

In the very instant of natality, the atmosphere did not resonate with jubilation-but with a silence profound and uterine, as if the cosmos itself held its breath. The mirror fractured, indeed-not through material defect, but by an excess of veritas. For what emerged was not merely a child: it was a seismic tremor. A shuddering within the very foundations of the discourse.

It was the primogenial being gestated within the mendacity of this freedom and delivered with a plenary consciousness thereof.

The sect faltered. Oculars diverted. Canticles lost their rhythmic cadence. Something had eluded the dominion of dogma. A nexus had been severed. The ensuing cascade was not one of revolt, but of lucidity. Doubt-that indomitable entity-began to suffuse the collective consciousness like sanguine ichor upon bleached linen.

And the woman, cradling the neonate in her arms, neither wept nor exulted. She merely traversed the shards of the fractured mirror, advancing towards the threshold where none had hitherto dared to venture. Her lacerated feet did not tremble. Her gaze did not seek celestial affirmation. She was, at long last, free-but not with the liberty she had been taught. It was another. More savage, more raw, more unalloyed.
More human.