Punctuation mark
«How’ve you been?» Colin asked. Pakul was again at loss for words. He felt like the question was coming out of nowhere, once a civilised manner of exchanging and enquiring about a fellow human’ state of mind, it had become a mere punctuation mark, cold and heartless, certainly not interested in the answer.
Pakul went for the shock and awe strategy: «You heard about this group of seven people that were abducted and left in a cave? You know, they explained how they awoke in a dark, cold room, with no memory of how they got there? Well, I was one of them.»
Colin’s jaw dropped to the floor, «WHAT?» he shouted,
«are you crazy?
Is this serious?!
Oh my Flying Spaghetti Monster!
How? I mean… What? …»
Now it was Colin’s turn to be at loss for words. He had even lost the ability to articulate them actually.
Merciless, Pakul kept on: «Complete darkness is scary I can tell you. We woke up as if blind, in this gigantic empty room. There was nothing there but us and water. At first we were like you Colin, shouting questions all over the place, banging on the walls, crying and hollering. Then dynamics changed, things became different. You remember how Mark Twain wrote that ‘Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.’? There we showed it to one another. We were blind, but we saw. We felt and experienced all of our dark sides, deep in our bones»
Colin was looking at Pakul, silently crying, tears just flowing out of his eyes and rolling down his cheeks, drawing punctuation marks on his compassionate face.
