It makes me wonder that I somehow attracted a woman like Corinna. That she could see something in me. Something soft when all life has ever shown me is hardness and pain. She is the softness. The goodness.
She is the sweet sugar mixed in with the black bitterness of the coffee that is my life. Or, that was my life. Now, it’s something else. Something new.
She wants more, my Corinna. I show her my feelings, as best I can. But I know she needs more. I have tried, so many times, to force my lips to shape the words—I love you—but I have always failed. And failure is not something I am accustomed to. It is not tolerated.
But this is not a skill, or a lesson, or an enemy. It is not a math equation or a tricky Latin verb conjugation. It is not a complex business transaction. It is…something that requires more of me. It requires I strip back the layers of myself. I had thought she knew all of me, that she’d seen all of my layers. But then I attempt to tell her I love her, and I realize that there are deeper layers yet to be revealed. It requires vulnerability. A kind of courage I do not know if I possess.
Why?
She knows I love her. More importantly, I know she loves me. But the words? There is something deeper there. Some blockage in my soul. The power of those words, which until Corinna I have never heard…it conquers me.
To tell Corinna that I love her is to bare the very last of myself to someone who could so easily destroy me. Because she possesses me.
All of me.
Even the lost, lonely little boy sitting on a couch at four in the morning with his drunk killer of a mother, watching twenty-year-old American cartoons.
When I have her in my arms again, after all of this, I will tell her.
I love you, my Corinna, my light, I shall say.I love you.
* * *
An airplane then—acargo jet, if I had to guess. I’m buckled into a jump seat, hands bound in front of me now. It’s cold. Loud. Echoing, juddering, precarious.
Hours, endless hours of nothing.
A harsh landing, jouncing me awake from a dull, stuporous sleep.
Another vehicle, this one the bouncing bed of a truck of some kind, a long step up, a cold wind blustering around me. Something flapping. More endless hours of this.
Voices chattering in a language I have trouble making out. Arabic, maybe. I smell cigarettes, body odor, diesel exhaust. Horns honk now, all around. Clattering engines, stop-start-stop-start traffic. The air heats until I’m suffocating from it.
I haven’t eaten or drank in I don’t know how many hours. My throat aches, each swallow feeling like knives. I’m dizzy.
After time I cannot measure, we make a turn, slowing, a pause, shouts, a creak as of a gate. The language is most definitely Arabic. That doesn’t narrow down my location very much, however. It is very, very hot. The truck stops, the tailgate is dropped with a loud clang. Hands shove me. I work to my feet and shuffle forward, but I’m shoved again, and this time I feel air around me and I’m falling, momentarily weightless…
And then I slam into the hard ground, and the breath is crushed from my lungs. I writhe in pain, trying to drag air into my chest. I’m hauled to my feet by rough hands. A voice snaps at me in Arabic, and I’m shoved forward again. I walk on shaky knees, still gasping for breath.
Footsteps echo as if in a low, narrow hallway, stone, perhaps. I feel a step down and manage to keep my balance rather than toppling down them, stumbling a few steps down before finding the rhythm. Something drips and echoes, telling me I’m underground.
A fist knots in my collar, halting me. Metal scrapes on stone, and I’m shoved forward, tripping, stumbling, and then I fall to the ground—hard, cold, damp flagstones.
CLANG.
I wait, catch my breath, let the aches and bruises pang and twinge.
Then, I hear it.
A shuffle.
A whimper—small, female.
“Hello?” I call.
I tentatively lift my hands, still bound in front, and work the hood off. I am underground, in a cell. Ancient, and to call it ancient is to underestimate its true age. Rusted manacles older than all of Western Civilization in a heap in one corner, a pile of bones with a grinning skull in another; a bench of stone fixed to the wall with fist-thick chain links.
Underneath the bench, huddled against the wall in as small a ball as she can make herself, a little girl.
