The spaces between are empty and we move from one trap to the next until we are too worn down to resist any more. The brightness fades from our eyes, the shine from greying hair, and our once hard bodies, ache, soften, crease, and sag like old leather.
The sweetness fills our senses. A gleam of light pulses faintly in gloomy grey the same rhythm as our heart. We taste the tang of salt and the oily acrid smell fills up our nostrils and clings to our fingers like syrupy garlic but these are memories. We stay when our hearts tell us to go.
The honey clings to us warm and inviting promising to take away all our pain. We want it so much but know that the price is life itself. We sink further in forgetting that the way out is to fight. We surrender to the dulling of our senses as the warm stickiness fills up our eyes, ears, mouth, nose and brain.
All there is now is soft and hazy and everything else is pain. We are one with the dulling golden ooze pulling us where it will go. The little light continues to pulse a little weaker now as our blurred eyes struggle to see through lids heavy with sticky sweetness. A sudden thought takes hold to escape and breathe again the cool night air, hear true sounds and taste again the sharp bitterness of living.
And as a murmur of realisation dawns down long corridors of consciousness a window opens. It doesn’t cling to us so powerfully and our limbs at last float free from its grip. With our last strength we climb free towards the light and lay down, exhausted, panting, at last beyond its reach. We feel again the weight of our bodies and as the last dregs run from our eyes ears and nose we sense the world again as if for the first time.
