The Chapel

One can only tell how much they are alive by the amount of pain they are in. My life is one such life that you can continually tell yourself, "Yes, I am alive." As it turns out however, my experience with the living seems to have reached it's end. Me, laying face down, gripping my heart through my shirt, as if holding it will make the pain stop. If only the pain could stop. Perhaps in these last few moments of conciousness I have I can convey to you my certain perdicament.

It has been four years after the last of my kin left this world. Being the tender age of 15 at the time, it was quite a painful experience. The funeral of which held both my cousin, age 12, and my grandmother, 82, of whom i had lived with for... as long as i could remember, at least, was promptly followed by a quick drive to the local boarding home for the orphaned children of the region. The 'house' was considerablly more of a church with cots laid out in spare storage rooms. It was supposedly a divine duty the nuns had to undertake to stuff us whever they could so long as they had us.

My cot was one of a select few of which had been decidedly planted in the rearest of rooms, not but about six or so feet from where the cathedral's smoke stack heater was mounted. However, I did have the pleasure of friendship by the leaking water pipe that occasionally gave me it's gift of extra water, which the cot would occasionally soak into itself, and the mice of the chapel, whom would occasionally show me i was in fact still alive by nibbling off a miniscule portion of my skin, usually while i was asleep nonetheless.