The diary of Anne Charlston, undated.

God forgive me; I wish to escape. I wish it more than any long forgotten love or peace on the wide Earth. I wish to melt into the bliss of immorality and satisfy only the thirst of my own throat, desperate for the waters of pure being; where I can drown in my own consciousness without interruption from raging agency that seeks to wash me into pools sluiced with the blood of toil and duty. I have my own concerns and dreams and should not one person be able to pursue their own solipsistic agenda? Why is there need for others to hold us above the water when our limbs can work to this effect? I tire, O, how I tire. How could you have done it? To work entirely for the betterment of others and then lay yourself upon the cross as your reward? I see no justice. What shall I have at my conclusion? A cross to be strung up on? If I die it shall be under my own terms. But what can I do to secure my place in my own vision of future’s bright hall? I see it: strung up not with crosses but the brightest chandeliers, reflecting off the stain glass of the happiest memories. All those I love are there on the long table – a veritable Valhalla I’m envisioning it seems – feasting on the kindness we passed among each other in small parcels, perfectly timed to strike the other into the bliss of loving company. We drink the wit of past jests and become drunk, on occasion, on fits of ribaldry – a touch of the base to make us love more the sting of virtue. Is my father there? Does he sit at the head of the table? Or does he linger as a portrait on the wall, struck eternally in his most affable pose – the kindest reflection of his soul and a prayer that eternity shall see him as the painter did in that moment. Can I bring his shell to bear the countenance of the pure soul within? I have tried but am unequal to the task. My friends offer words but have abandoned me. I have no prospect of finding the love of man. I am a lonely wretch shackled with a hobgoblin whose chain fetters my ankle with the clank of doom. Oh God forgive these allusions!
Yet am I haunted more by the past when I had my freedom and moulded nothing from its clear air, breathing in and out, retaining nothing; holding breath for life yet not breathing life. Such do I see the curse of the reticent made manifest within me. We wish for solitude yet despise it. We long for love yet hold it at arm’s length. We wish for immortality but without the sacrifice of our mortality. How can we live yet not live? We want while not wanting and need without the requisite needs. I’m going mad. Perhaps my father is the only sane voice in this house. Staring at the combustion of ages and seeing it only fit for scorn. He was bellowing last night in what constitutes sleep for his wretched psyche, and his words were of the purest design to wrench my heart. Being distant, in my own room, I could not make out all that he sent to the heavens in caterwauls of pain – wishing, it seems, to only be heard and looked upon with pity and grace – but I could make out my mother’s name, spared the indignity of being scornfully attributed as he does with all others, including my own, placed in the highest circle of heaven which he knows he shall never reach, being as he is, an instrument of wrath - perhaps divinely purposed for this role, as all have their place in God’s design. Yet, despite all my misery I wish only for their reunion, and ours – this fallen, broken family. O how I miss you! My dearest sweet mother! I wept when father called your name and weep now in the writing of this pathetic journal. How could you so swiftly leave us? You see how everything fell to ruin the instant you were not among us to guide us as angels do. I have your hair yet nothing of its shimmer. I have your smile yet nothing of its warmth. I cannot take your place - none ever could.
Father knows this best of all as the best part of himself sits in the heavens whilst the worst languishes on Earth. Yet are we all shadows of ourselves where previously you brought light to our forms, seeing in us what no introspection could ever divine. Father loved us through your eyes as did Richard and I each other. Is a star birthed or can it be forged? I ask as ours has been extinguished and I know of no way to reignite its fierce and loving blaze. Is anyone being meant to bear the darkness of loss, truly? If a flame is relit is it the same flame as was previously warming our hearth? And when it returns can we ever truly forgive those that blindly lashed out in darkness, unable to see, unwilling to care whom they thrust to the ground in their wish to return to comfort of light? Will it not always be writ upon their face, the moment love suspended in place of acrimony? I cannot bear it; perhaps I do not wish for the return of what once was if such I must suffer in illumination but rather, bear the world in darkness, feel my way through, not looking for sympathies and consolations – returns to past familial glories, regurgitated through false panegyrics. It is clear to me now, there can be no return to what once was; a new form of love and forgiveness must be forged between these fractured survivors and old tales must be viewed through the lens of untethered madness, seeing distant refractions of happy imps, jarring against our solemn wakefulness; creating charred conflictions in a humbled heart that can no longer touch what was once ubiquitous.
But I have rambled endlessly with no result. I hear my father’s dreams speak and think of Dante – it cannot be otherwise – and now my dreams have become infected by the grim passage through Inferno despite the possibilities of Paradiso we may otherwise dwell upon. But such are our pessimistic times within this bastion of wrath and lovelessness. I dreamt of a personal horror that tears apart the structure of my vanity, for what is happiness but a wish for our vanity to be fulfilled? Here do dreams teach what I cannot otherwise determine through meditation. Maggie’s fiancé George advised I should take up poetry so I shall employ it thus in the recording of my dream, in Terza Rima, as Dante intends for his hell-walk. May my lines be true to the horror and redemption I envisioned through the turbulent hours of sleep:

I pitch through rocky scree unto the light,
Whose substance feeds a fiery world below
Where torments ‘scapes unwanted by the night.

My guide speaks words that inner wisdom sow,
“Let not your heart be troubled by their screams
For suffer those who bear what evils grow.”

But still I lack th’ vision o’ pious dreams
To heed such wisdom for their echoed wails
Permeate my empathetic seams.

My guide observes when inner courage fails
Believing what will come will sear within
My mind what God’s true justice bourn entails.

I bow my head in shame and stumble in
Behind my pious guide whose certain pace
Defies the maw devour’ng heels of sin;

As if a hole within the cloth of space
Absorbing light in subtract effulgence
That sanctions horror - horror born from grace.

Afeared to haunt alone this darkness dense
I lunge t’ward flame unsure - though trusting fate -
Companionship be worth hell’s recompense.

Engloomed upon the path my guide doth await,
Conversing with a creature built not grown
A flesh amalgamation, limb surfeit.

This horror first against my senses thrown,
So fresh in its afront to sight and smell,
Withdrew me back unto my earthly home.

Again my guide whose inner wisdom swells,
Born of the fruit of Earth in purity,
Untouched by lust and yearnings th’ fallen dwells,

Did draw me onwards, testing vanity
For weakness leads the vain unto their doom
As lost are those that spurn all majesty.

A hand extended; beacon through the gloom
I followed without thought for what awaited
Toward the creature honed within its tomb.

And there upon my trembled form incited
In a’ voice that avalanched in toxic air
Suffocating hope of hope’s light sighted,

“Be closer still but not as close as her,
For she I cannot touch but you I may,
For mortal meat proves treat for our despair.

I see within your gleaming eyes you pray
To understand the nature of my crime
To better know where sympathy should lay

This I should reveal all in good time
But first I must impose ‘pon your largesse:
Bestow me with a story or a rhyme;

A tale that cruel infinity may bless,
For time is of immortal bearing here
And never may be slain or length compress,

But given but a cherished word of cheer;
An anecdote where light and love once grew
Or lines from verse intentions purely seer,

Thus drawing into crystalline review
The trees and seas and blood and flesh and tears;
A palate to refract affections true.

This morsel may digest a thousand years
For even through the agony of hell
A single pure word may reach our ears;

As when a note harmonically will dwell
Within th’ harshest dissonance of choirs;
Through deserts long - a solitary well.

This I ask before my false tongue tires
For only words imbibed with what we’ve lost
Hold value for the damned within these fires.”

Despite disgust my eyes to ears accost
It’s words most eloquent still touched me so
To force my empathy to warmth from frost.

But sensing my desire through words to show
A fable as a favor to the beast
My guide said first, “Let not your kindness flow,

Waste not your words for God decreed it best
For any sent eternally to bathe
In torment, ne’er to ever come to rest,

For good is ill where heaven’s fire’s scathe,
As justice deems their grief doth unrelent,
Therefore this soul’s long pain you must not swathe.”

To this the grotesque being did consent,
“Alas, your guide, ethereal and wise,
Illuminates the mischief I repent,

For seeketh your good heart to bad advise
By granting unto me this simple kindness
Which here in hell is evil in disguise.

But though a word I cannot from you press
My voice is still my own and doth obey,
For only may I bless and not be blessed.

So hear this rancid voice my woes convey
For should such woes prevent a dire fate
Then taketh I what comfort they betray.

Although imagination shan’t create
An image of my shape when Earthly bred
Please know I was a woman harsh of pate;

A mediocrity in beauty’s spread
Outshone upon the stage by fairer ones
And wishing thereupon to forge ahead.

But how a better face should so be won?
Or molded pretty as though wrought of clay?
Fo’ any Prometheus I knew but none.

Without a chance to color cheeks long grey
I sought by darker means to gratify
The envy that upon our heart would flay.

For ev’ry face aglow I chanced to spy
A curse I laid upon them for the pox
Or any means to beauty putrefy.

For most the curse produced no howling shocks
Yet some it stung upon with piled distress;
Sundering once perfect skin to feeble stocks.

And even should they never convalesce
And die from my redundancies of hate
My conscience would no sick delight suppress.

This joy at pain my blackened heart did sate.
As youth withdrew and spinster I became
Until my mischief wrought too ill a fate.

One pox upon a girl I was to blame
(A youth whose age should not have caused me grief,
But such was malice so untouched by shame

That even youth whose beauty is but brief
Was cause enough to force my baleful tongue)
Blossomed into plague, that deathly thief.

Throughout the village young and old death stung
As quick as if Apollo’s bow had rained
His vengeful darts o’ which Homer’s muse had sung.

Although through bitterness my heart was drained
Of empathetic pain t’wards those who fell
My body was as sure of sickness strained.

Thus upon death my soul fell here to hell
Within a form disgusting to all sight
With oozing sores and stench no breeze may quell.

With surplus limbs three left and seven right
And flesh enfolding flesh in mounds abound
A vast abomination born of blight.

I shall not speak of why this form He found
To punish me, for all is clear to see
By any who may think with reason sound.

But there is much you unaware may be
That time and pain reveal through eons long,
Like ancient stalactite’s formed gradually.

These lessons, faults of mine, may steel you strong,
For flesh is but for brimming souls an urn
Distracting from the quench to steer us wrong.

For stowed within is where we o’ beauty learn,
Though supercilious the body sways
On guard lest any would this truth discern.

I’ll tell you of the tricks it constant plays
Lest envy clutch your heart as it did mine
And damn to flesh the doleful devil flays.

The figure first at glimpse, by cruel design,
Denotes by gait and shape the pedigree;
Slovenly born or royalty refine.

Presenting then of life that panoply;
That stage, bare inches, ovular and plane
To which all sorrow, joy and rage we see.

Here our entertainment shall ne’er wain
For fortune pens an ever twisting tale,
Each turn to draw the supple flesh in pain;

Each lilting brow and twisting nose impale
As much as any smirk the mouth imparts
And eyes, O, how when worshipped virtues fail,

For some have claimed them windows to our hearts
But how can any mortal flesh so claim
A truer sight inside immortal parts?

In truth these orbs deserve no such acclaim
When flicking t’ward the light in bird-like twitch,
And horrid would they be without their frame;

That trickster flesh will’st ever hearts bewitch
And force upon the weak the dim conceit
Of thinking heaven drawn our bodies pitch.

The brow and cheek will bond to sow deceit,
Mockery making wings of further vision;
Flutter’ng not beyond the wrinkled cheat.

You wonder then, “what hides ‘neath this elision?
What more our mortal faculties extract?”
Nothing, when sought through mortal imprecision.

For herein lies what time congeals to fact:
‘tis only deepest art and dearest love,
And wisest speech and purest act,

And contemplation of th’ heav’ns above
Alone that will evince the soul obscure
In glimpses natured harsh to gently shove

T’ward truth these acts prove ev’ry soul is pure,
Each beggar, Pope and tyrant: all as one,
And only through their flesh, divine abjure.

For bodies breed corruption ‘neath a sun
That mimics heav’n, illuminating lies
That force esteem on what the eye should shun.

And thinking so draws forth my forlorn sighs
For sins of vanity shall here condemn,
A weakness for the soul the demon buys,

But of those godly acts that goodness stem
We cannot know for they are of the soul
And souls we cannot know beyond the hem.

‘Tis God alone who understands them whole
For from his body bleeds to us from sky;
Forming an ocean pure; for us a shoal.

And why if gifted drops should we not try
To see beyond the shallow depth we claim
Yet do not touch with any seeing eye.

Instead when our perception sets its frame
Of sight miraculous it tends to dwell
On the corporeal alone. O shame!

What more we all could learn to envy quell
Were not our minds transfixed 'pon the benign
And trite flung mouths that dire cast their spell;

As if in our symposium we pine -
Enraptured by the vessel made of clay
Without a though of drinking of the wine.

For bodies may be art as beauties say
But still through artist’s eyes we comprehend
Beyond the realm where such an eye may stray.

But now I sense our time is at an end
Though time has little meaning to me here
For one or years a million; eons blend.

And should another mortal soul pass near,
It shall be though these eyes did you just see
As memory shall not record you clear.”

Thus closed the creature’s sad soliloquy
And though my guide did hold my tongue at rest
My face could not withhold brute sympathy.

Though surely little comfort would digest
To one bereft of any faith of face
And any subtle signs its lines confessed.

“Come”, said my guide, ta’en my arm to brace,
“Leave hushed this wretch to her philosophy
And vent to deeper halls of preened disgrace .”

Thus trembling we descended th’ fiery sea.