FORE WORD They will end my life one length of a sentence from now.
Or maybe a three-part Grecian poem longer—if the blazes had coursed through the wood of the courtroom’s ceiling as planned and melted the door with the walls shut.
I believe the little reader in your head living beyond one sentence old can tell you much of how that turned out. And the voices will too, swarms of high-pitched ringing to shatter the glass for escape routes. Seems like even in death I am kept to myself, having only everything burning around me. So take a seat, loitering jury, perhaps you can bear witness and peel your eyes wider than the fur padding on the duke’s burning throne. Indulge in the revelries of the creeping heat and the last words of a widowed man for none here is left but the broken chandeliers, and you, to judge my crimes against humanity.
I’ve always lived my life on edge, bearing the cross of marking my time when I could easily just cast it away. I was waiting for perfection you see, as much as I was waiting for the apocalypse to destroy everything I would have done. My existence was doomed by a paradox I created, and it did me no better than to hide in things that made the world stagnant. But please, don’t be too hard on me, I am only a man with no godly key to the doors he locked himself in.
Still, my fate wouldn’t be something you’d imagine to rust on a pillory, who could begin to foresee that, on a man who had never even felt a bead of sweat in his neck or have the sun reach his back. For I had everything: manors, vineyards, and the finest of steeds, all because I was born. And I acted as if I’d been damned by the Earth with all the gold put on silver platters when many would cross volcanoes for a life I was gifted. I testify still—that by keeping me alive long enough to see the ending is a curse. And such blessings made it all possible. But to have witnessed the beginning is heaven on Earth. Even if I had to fight an apocalypse, even if it meant disturbing a meteor shower to come a thousand years late, I would have rewinded the cosmos and time to have met a stablemaster not too taller than six feet. I would have taken his hand with me and ran breath-takingly to the woods where everything is quiet. Lived in a hut where no gunshots can startle the unbridled horses, and no suffocating suit and wig to chain a nobleman upright—only an endless stream of river we can bask in. But alas, no beginning search for no resolution. And sooner as treasured things begin, sooner do they end.
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