leaving...

She lay motionless, encased in the empty predawn darkness. Her shift, soaked and caked with black red, wraped around her small form like a cocoon. Some small figuritive beating of her heart still exsisted; she felt the last of its dominance comanding her broken body slowly and fluidly like a wave of numbing euphoria. Her life spilled out in front of her eyes like still pictures that no longer contained any measurable amount of happiness or meaning. The sweet inocence of her childhood, her mothers comforting embrace, the river where she met him two summers ago, the eyes that had sworn to protect her from all of lifes' uncertainty and pain...these no longer mattered, had irrelevant and erroneous value. Her soul no longer cried for justice, she let any lingering thought of hatred for her accusers slip away. Her sentence was to die for a crime that she had unknowingly only played a very small part and in her undoing, she was blinded by her love for him. Only his face now remained; the look of love tangled with shame in his eyes as they took her to her death, the trembling betrayal in his voice as he denounced her. The last wave of pain sent a chilling ache throughout her body , then let go as the window high above sent a deluge of light that pooled and pulsated on the cold grey stone floor all around her. This is it, she thought, this is where all that I was and all that I will never become will finally come to its end. The unfathomable and disheartening conclusion to a beautiful existence realized in a cold, damp cell; and within its barreness, her only salvation, was the light of the morning sun.