Lares,
Worry no longer for the original awfulness that I now am and always have been. His voice stopped overtaking mine many miles ago. He is not constantly in the air around us, as we are taught—rather, we carry him within our breast. A heavy splash of jetsam. An eternally symbiotic infection.
I know not what I expected in such a land fit only for exile and apoplexy… However naively, I still fostered specks of hope that my Earthly journey could be terminated by my own hand at any time I so pleased.
He doesn’t even grant me the pleasure of that.
Forced into eternal famine. Doomed to eat yet become hungry — desperately hungry! — within moments. My belly becomes fire. Each bite I till from the grassless ground seems to make respite an additional torture: it is the pauses of pleasure amongst pain that exacerbate suffering.
My farming equipment dances before me as however many myriad of ways of exterminating myself from a life I did not have the capacity to wish for. Even my tools tease me!
You talk of the tempting allure of doomed flames as if they were the enemy. How wrong you have grown—I hardly know you. Soon, Lares, your fingers will fall into tempo with mine and a death-never-granted will fill fantasies so potent that you wish you could live amongst their tales. Your positivity ails me.
Why I still write to you when all writing is an expression of hope, I do not know. I can end that form of torture, at least.
Your ink that once crawled amongst my love of life has developed into a hue that reflects only the sorrow constantly upon me. Why torture myself with such childish peppiness? In time, Lares, you will despise time as much as I.
Lilith