The shadow of death was behind me, perpetually, like a faithful lover, tearing from my heart every hope of being loved and cherished as a unique treasure. It was a distorted mirror that reflected my anguish and my fears. It filled my cell with scarlet red incense, which constantly suffocated me, stifling me and preventing me from seeing my own image.
I lived this suffocating and abominable pseudo‑reality in constant terror, no longer understanding whether it was real or a surreal fantasy, the product of my hallucinations. I perceived those distressing candles that burned me alive every time I approached their presence.
The cold rock walls were so thick that, however much I strove to cry out and scream my pain, no one could ever hear it—no mortal and no creature from the subterranean world of the afterlife to which, apparently, I now belonged.
Amid dust and drops of my blood, I was relegated like a lifeless creature, feeding on the faint light of the blood‑red candles, and that suffocating incense that penetrated every part of my body. Even the stars refused to cast light into that narrow cell, where my pierced heart had been nailed to a dilapidated wall as if it were a souvenir on display.
I no longer had the capacity to harbour a desire or to hope for an existence wrapped in enchanted flowers and love spells. Everything I had dreamed of I had lost in the abyss of obliteration, and all that I had vainly pursued in my miserable existence had vanished, having only materialised into a bleak and mortifying prison for my soul.
And thus I vanished into that menacing and omnipresent cloud that loomed over me. Even the decrepit walls, made of cold and indifferent rock, had no tears to shed for my bitter demise. I myself had become the shadow of death, no longer a mortal being but a creature of that world I had so long shunned, which, despite everything, had devoured me entirely and inescapably.
Elisabetta Esther
