Prompt 11

Prompt: "How strong do you want to be? How much are you willing to give up to be that strong?"

No Word Limits

Word Count: 569

Part of me really likes this and another really hates it, so I guess it's average?

It’s an old sort of feeling, creaking through my skull. Warm and fuzzy, like I’ve just woken up, or been awake too long. Dark, everything is in browns and gold’s. I don’t see color anymore, just brown covering my eyes. Age, I think, has both its ups and its downs. My fingers crack every time I move them; that’s a down. But I’m not running anymore; that’s an up.

My skin is stretched tight, rather than wrinkled, material stretched too tight over a metal frame, my muscles ache, always, and I don’t hear anymore. Getting old.

I’m twenty two.

Back, deep in the recesses of my dark fuzzy mind, warm and buttery soft, and oil slick is a memory, sometimes I can grasp it. That memory tells me this is my fault. The arm chair made of cotton candy stuffing, and the blanket made of warm dawn sunshine, and the numbed feet, these are my fault.

Sixteen. I was sixteen, too young to make that kind of decision. Still am, no matter how slowly I move, or think, or blink, I’m still too young. I’ve learned, I hope; hope that I’d grown a bit before I die. And I hold no illusions, I’ll die soon. Very soon. I accept that that’s my fault. My decisions brought me to where I am today, even if I was too young to have been making them.

There was such a sense of urgency to it all though. To all of it, then. Now, there’s a sort of snug slowness to it all; like I said, it’s golden. Then though, that memory, it was blue; grey maybe. Cold and unattached. Like a glacier. It was bad then, I remember. No money, no food, no sight, no strength. The man had offered me a good deal.

He would teach me to be strong. In turn I would work for him, for as long as I could, or, ten years, whichever came first. I can’t find it in me to be angry with him, he did warn me.

“How strong do you want to be? How much are you willing to give up to be that strong?”

“Everything.”

Not that I thought I’d had much to give. I was dying, I was born that way, but it seemed, the end, that is, to be coming so very quickly at the time, I had no money, and no life. Metaphorically, that is. So, I said everything. I meant it, and he knew that. Knew it well.

He gave me strength.

Strength though is a fickle thing, and there are all sorts of strength. Strength of body, and of mind, are the ones that seem most obvious. He gave me strength of body. But strength, like I said, is a fickle, fleeting thing. You can have mild strength for a long time, or great strength for a short time; strength of body often comes at a lack when it comes to strength of mind.

We trained my body to be strong, but we didn’t train my mind. My body started dying, slowly at first, and then quickly. And now, now my strength of mind is going too, before I ever really got the chance to use it.

Strength is a weak thing, an ideal more than anything. Strength is everywhere; we just have to see it, to look. But, then, I’ve been blind for quite some time.