These Words Of Hate Toward the Sun Come As I Write By Candlelight | Teen Ink

These Words Of Hate Toward the Sun Come As I Write By Candlelight

December 6, 2007
By Anonymous

His eyes opened.
There he sat.
Surrounded by nothingness.
He was alone in a terribly small, mainly dark room.
There was some manner of light in the room which let his eyes discover things as he looked about, but in his current position, it was a foolish thing to even try to assume where this odd mellow light was coming from.
This room was oddly shaped, and had many flaws.
He was no architect, but even he could see the faults of this room.
It had, chipped edges, and stains on the ceilings.
The floor was uneven, but just slightly.
If you were an ant or some other small creature you would not be able to tell.
For the slant was so unnotable, that unless you had a large view on things, you would never even realize the flaw.
As he sat there pondering his surroundings,
He soon realized there were markings on the wall directly in front of him.
They were bold but not vibrant.
He honestly wondered how they had not been scratched off by the time, being it appeared the wall was fairly old and weathered.
As he leaned closer to them,
he started to examine them.
The words were written in an old font.
In fact, the font was so unused now that he couldn't even make out some of the letters so he just decided what words they were by thinking of things that would probably fit the statements.
He started reading.
The words were few but very demanding.
The words spoke of a corridor,
A dark, stale corridor of which he should never go down.
And a pouch,
of which he should never look in.
Though the sentence that spoke of the pouch was written in slightly smaller print than the the first topic.

Now at this time,
In this small amount of minutes he had been in the room,
He had no idea there was even a corridor.
For when he had looked around the room earlier,
at some places, the light did not shine exactly right and did not let him get a real view of things.
But because of this knowledge that had been put directly and so boldly in front of him.
He couldn't help but ask himself,
"Where is this corridor?
Why should I not go in it?"
But more importantly,
he started to ask himself,
"Who wrote these words of wisdom?
Was it the architect of this room?
Or was it perhaps,
Someone like him, who had been in this position before.
And maybe just thought that going down the corridor could only bring sadness or evil into their lives?"

Answering those questions were important,
But not as important as wondering about about the pouch.
He had not noticed a pouch yet.

But soon, he decided to get up and look around.
Tripping over his own feet at first for they were so unused to being used.
He fell an astonishing 13 times.
He never quite figured out why his feet resisted his commands so much.

Soon he felt his foot lightly graze a small smooth object.
He bent to the ground and picked it up.
It was amazing.
A red or burgandy velvet pouch,
he couldn't tell exactly at the time.
It was lovely to look at.
But even more lovely to touch.
He rubbed his hands on this pouch and felt the outlines of an object inside it.
Very quickly,
he forgot about the beauty of the pouch and started wondering over its internals.
He filled his head with thoughts of what it could be.
He began to untie the soft thread and look inside,
but he soon recalled the previous prophecy he was shown.
He really wondered over why someone would tell him to not look in it, because it was beautiful.
And so after about an hour of pondering over it he said to himself.
"Well, I don't see any reason not too,
After all, The words stating the warning of the pouch were written smaller than the words of on the corridor.
They couldn't be near as important.
And on another note, what if it was talking about about a different pouch?
For this one was far too appealing to just be cast aside."

He reached into the pouch and felt a small wooden box.
It had rough edges,
almost like sandpaper.
He took it out and closely examined it in the dim light,
Soon realizing it was a match box.
He quickly decided to strike one of the matches and further light the room.
Then another after that one died then another.
He began realizing the light didn't last nearly long enough.
So he began wondering what to do.
He started traveling around the room some,
tripping over the floor about 3 to 4 more times.
He soon enough came upon a object hanging on the wall.
It was in a part of the room he hadn't looked around much yet.
He felt it.
It was cool, and cold.
But just cold enough to give him something to feel and not to be pained by.
He looked at it and realized on top of it sat a candle and that it was a candle holder.
In a frantic rush, he lit the candle with one of the matches from the box.
While he was holding the match in his hand striking it on the box,
he felt he remembered some important saying about this box, but this new discovery was far too important for him to waste his time pondering anything else.
He lit the candle,
it slowly burned and he had finally found a reliable light source.
He felt it was rational to use it,
He had gotten tired of being limited by that gloomy and sad light and wanted a chance to see brighter than he ever had in this still unfamiliar room.

Upon lighting the candle,
He had the chance to see there was another candle to his left, so he lit it.
Then he realized there was another to the left of that, so h e lit it.
He did this until the room was fully illuminated and he no longer felt alone and unaware.
For while he still had many questions about unviewable things..
He finally found something he could see and touch and feel,
it was very comforting.

Right after he was done lighting the last candle he noticed a small corridor type hole in the wall.
He immediately flashed back to those huge letters about a corridor.
He soon remembered to stay away from it,
so he did.
He was so rewarded by this new sense of being able to see things clearly he needed no other prize for quite some time at least.

Time passed.
A day,
he slept.
And when he awoke,
He noticed 5 of the candles had gone out.
So he quickly had to patch them up,
he wondered why the would go out, because there was no wind.
But the fact that he could, by himself, rekindle them was a sufficient enough answer.
He soon got hungry.
He looked around for food, but found none.

After a while of being mildly hungry he became extremely hungry.

He frantically looked around the room many more times for food but always stayed away from looking at the dank corridor.
But, when your head is spinning and you are in a rage, you "accidently" stumble onto things that you didn't mean to.
He found there was crumbs of bread in the outskirts of the hole.
He quickly grabbed them and gobbled them up.

Moving forward and forward but very slowly,
The pieces kept getting bigger.
Eventually.
He got so far in the corridor he no longer could see.
The light was far enough away now where it was no longer any use to him.
He looked around,
He found another candle on the wall of the corridor.
He quickly lit it and traveled further.
Then he found another and repeated the process.
Now the act of moving forward was no longer spurred by hunger, but by curiosity.
Despite the warning,
He wanted to know what was out there.
He wanted to see the truth.
He justified this by telling himself he was "seeking food for future reference", and he honestly believed it.
But eventually he came to a point where the corridor got bigger,
wider,
as wide as the room he had been in.
Heck, it was even wider.
The air in the room was more clean.
He felt more peaceful,
Less frantic.
Less worried.
He started to think the corridor was never ending and just got better and better, more brighter and cleaner over time.

He had a smile on his face as he tracked on,
lighting every knew candle he saw, using the back side of the match sticks by getting fire from the previous flame when he ran out.
But eventually.
He started thinking.
Why does this always keep getting better?
Surely, one day it will run out.
Possibly, it will get bad at the end like the warning said it would.
His brain flashed images of his first site of the letters.
They were far to bold and set in his brain for him to turn back on.
So he turned back on the corridor.
He started to walk the other way.
To go back in the other direction, back to his now unbearably small "home".
He started to put out all of the candles he passed by.
Knowing,
that the candles,
in all their brilliance would only lead him to stray from the warning.
They would make him want to go further beyond them.

He finally got back.
Even though his discovering and enlightening journey was over.
He felt obligated to sit and read those words over and over.
He felt a sense of "happiness" if you could call it that.
He felt like he had escaped sure doom at the end of that corridor.
But always in the back of his mind he wondered what it would've been like if he would've have kept the course.

So there he sat.
With those original candles still lit and light in the room but none coming from the corridor.

There he sat in sweet contradiction.
But somehow,
Reading the words made him feel better.
So he read them until he starved to death.
And in his final breath.
He asked himself.
"Why didn't I find more food and continue down the path in which I was so happily on?"

And then he died.
And the room was left empty.
His body still lay there on the uneven floor,
The candles lit by the matches from the pouch that originally was forbidden still burning to help the very words that denied him from using them to be seen.


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