Liar.
Traitor.
Guilty.
These three degrading words weigh down on me as I depart from the home I once knew. They stalk me like ceaseless shadows, hissing at my back; every syllable pronounces the disgust and hatred like sharp knives carving open a corpse. The physical pain is dulled, but the scathing intentions still pierce cunningly past the skin, blood, and bone marrow to the intangible part of the human being: the soul.
Tattered.
Forlorn.
Implicit.
I know my destiny. I met its foreshadowing companion long ago. But it doesn’t mean I want it. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t anticipate that in a mere few hours my world would turn upside down. That my relatively decent reputation would plummet to the earth, faster than a stone descending with gravity at its back. And now I walk to a place, away from home, away from the past. Away to the future.
Step.
By.
Step.
My weary feet trudge past rutted crevices, overgrown weeds, and miniature rivers created by rainfall, but I do not see where I am going. Darkness presses around me from all sides, I’m only aware of the road that lays ahead of me. The road is desolate, continuing straight on toward the horizon. Flat, barren, and vast, I am alone, stumbling over my own feet across no-man’s-land, onward to another place, onward for eternity.
Punish.
Exile.
Forever.
Three more ugly words swirl in my brain, swimming round my senses until I’m drunk, intoxicated by my own actions. Sickening, that’s what it is. Arrested for thinking, banished for speaking out, forgotten because I no longer exist. My bold words defied my upbringing, my authority, all by the simple act of questioning. I had dared to ask “Why?” and this is what I must do to pay for it. Forever journeying to nowhere and everywhere.
Freedom.
Serenity.
Mine.
These thoughts blanket my bitter memories, smothering them forever as water douses fire. I am free, liberated from the chains in which my past has ensnared me since birth. I am embarking on an adventure that has never been accomplished since my ancestry: to begin life on a fresh plate, with no large community to build upon or improve. I am alone, but no longer desolate. I am alone but with a purpose, a dream: freedom.