Sanatorium
The voices are gone. In the muteness of these nights and days preceding them, their faint reminiscences wilt, as microscopic skin rinds attached to the subtle roughness of things or to the edge of a caress. None word raises up against this endless moor of silence, against this devastation of the unspeakable.
Taking the overused road of sweat, tears and self-serving, has no point anymore. Their abandonment –so resounding that not even the deepest echoes of their remembrance beam the slightest trace of any form– grows larger upon these badlands of apathy, where the stench of dead minutes spreads out its abyssal nausea.
What will become of them? In nights like this, they used to come in droves, boisterous, howling or whispering enigmas that only the darkness can keep and decrypt. They opened the jails of these walls and boiled in blunt, winged, sonorous bursts, spinning around into a swirl of unending wind, having their fill with peals of laughter and fiery delusions. Outside the world, always outside, shivered with the consistency of a frail leaf about to crack down without remedy. Its fierce demons yielded, brought down under the turmoil of their maddening notes.
Now only an eternal silence persists, and around him, these walls turned into a thin, shaking membrane, ready to become dust before a world rising with its precison gear and common sense. From the vast aphonia of no return he can hear it getting closer, there, on the other side, besieging him, as a voice asks and another answers. Yes, he can go now, at last, sign here, don’t forget the monthly check-up, sure, bye.
Before walking out, he turns to see the narrow aisles fenced by doors opening and closing, reduplicated endlessly. In the distance, he listens to dark echoes, feverish murmurs coming out from some sad figures moving around, as ghosts without direction, replicating the inscrutable messages of voices that will never come back. Not for him, at least. Torn them out from the core, their exposed roots will end up rotting and drying up until the ashes.
Let’s go? Yes, let´s go. The world, finally. Crossing the threshold, he feels the thin dust of the last membrane dropping down upon a remote fold of his soul. That’s it. It’s time for another voices, another sounds, growing and multiplying unabated, feeding the creeping demons of a sensibleness pale as a corpse, pervading a vast hollowness empty of voices, fraught with a dense silence, a silence as final as death.
