Enlightenment

"Is it a cave or is it a tomb?"
She threw the question in the air, a small and round vernacular grenade, where it dissolved and hanged on heavily. It was poisonous smoke, invading each and every pore with certainty and defiance.

He felt it hitting him in the face, a slap from his reflection (but one that was consciously taken, this time).

Both the sanctuary and the prison, it was consecrated ground - the rarely used television, the bed strategically positioned by the window, the most constant and ancient piece of furniture. It might as well have been made of stone.
The history of him and of them breathed with vibrant life, though softly concealed. Memories survived buried under a slight layer of grey sand, underneath the carpet. The symbols were both origins and materializations of devotion, as brightly colored infant rabbits gently placed on the tallest shelf, staring straight at your humble believing eyes. He was, after all, a believer at heart. 

There were tons of people accomodated in the bedroom, looking at each other for years but remaining strangers. It was very crowded, but not uncomfortable. The people were dead, so no physical issue was ever pondered in that matter. Dead are also the saints, figures of worship and objects of wonder: unreachable to the touch of a living hand, but ever so present in the mind's eye. Their absence just as present. Their words of wisdom and guidance echoed lost somewhere in between the earth, for the earth held too many voices at once, all of them equally nourished by the perfect ammount of humidity and warmth, chosen with the personal touch of the mother herself. Still it was confusing, especially when the sudden flood of silence preyed on him. The saints would not shine any light on those nights of skeptical distortion and muffled doubt. The reflection menaced, it was the discrete imp within working its way toward the end.

Warm and moist, welcoming, like the uterus, it was a church of the child and the jail of the grown tree, precocious but aborted. He blossomed in ecstasy only when faith filled his lungs and the clothes were no longer heavy and wet from the secretions - sweat, lachrymal waste, water. Because it was still earth, there was no space for those oceanic habits, the contradictions were harmful to him.

But how deep in the ground, exactly? He wondered how permanent the nature of it all was, the imprisonment and the praying, as he started to see instead of blindly swallowing. It was the single grain that separated the hermit from the corpse. The budding sapling from the poplar. So he exhaled the poison from the question, without a resolve, but with a clearly formed path to follow.

It is not a cave or a tomb; it is for him to discover.