spoon

Today I'm picking at the rock with a spoon, plotting my escape from Chateau D'If. Not plotting per se, but finding relief in chipping at miles of stone with an unlikely tool...unearthing my freedom one spoonful at a time. What seems like a willful entrance into 14 years of labor that only madness can propel, is actually a test of dedication. How bad do I want to get out of here? And the spoon digs deeper, and faster, and the pile of earth beside me is mounting higher, and higher. Bury it at night, lest the guards catch wind of my lust for sunlight...start again tomorrow. Spend the nights with hummmmm still in my hands from a day's worth of digging, the sound of the metal against the stone, the progress on the pile and my plans to double it in the first hour of tomorrow's infinite struggle.

Better, is it, to listen to the sound of the water and let that salty memory be enough? To expel all hope for a return to the sea, to feel danger again and be crushed by the currents--an impossible escape--rather than slowly curl my spine into a nautilus swirl, a forgotten creature, forcibly vacated and empty.

No, I say. I'll keep digging. Even if today is only half a teaspoon--enough to hold in the palm and feel a teaspoon closer to warm raspberries, swaying fields, a masquerade in honor of the hell-bent. Dented and weary, my hands withering and resolve now stemming from some unknown pocket of will, I flip sand and gravel and rock and moss. Counting the mountains and mole hills I've created all around me...un, deux, trois, quatre....tiny models of where I long to be.