Mauer im Kopf

She is her own Iron Curtain. I believe that she was born hairless and blind, within a Berliner Mauer of her own purposeful creation.

It was tantamount to a life sentence. She is free in every physical sense of the word, and yet she lives but a half life. She is manacled in darkness behind encumbering, onerous walls. Walls of gelatinous ice that grow thicker and colder by the year. Nobody could scale those walls.

Angular shadows circle the perimeter. They tote sleek, black revolvers stocked with the silver-tongued ammunition of sharp words. The orders? Shoot to kill. The heavy artillery is in fact, a fusillade of barbed rhetoric designed to wreak mayhem on magnanimity. These guards have no qualms in kicking a grounded bitch.

You may ask, as many have, why she hides behind such fortifications. I sometimes entertain fanciful notions of drawbridges or ladders; of a secret door or a knowing prince who could penetrate her sanctity, though I know of none myself.

But the truth isn't nearly so romantic. She severed her own golden locks and flung them from the window of her Rapunzel tower; barricaded the doorways with red brick and mortar, and melted up the iron keys with her own fiery temper.

She doesn't want to be saved. She never has.

It saddens me, because I feel in my bones that the very walls that house her are about to come under seige.

And I hate to think of them falling in on her.