3 more compartments

You are alerted of this compartment by text message. Your phone softly buzzes on the coffee table and emits a short jingle as a connotation of arrival. You pick it up and swipe the screen. There it is: another compartment. There is text in this compartment. It litters the floors, paints the walls, fogs the air. It is all consuming as you read it. It is digital and harsh. It does not have the parched feeling of paper. There is no heart to it. You place your phone back down on the coffee table. Now you have absorbed this compartment. It has changed you. Its words have altered the direction of your thoughts. Now you are thinking about sex. Now you are thinking of a memory of sex. Now you are thinking about a song in that memory. This compartment has unfolded nicely inside your head. There are others that do not. Deep within me. Down past the compartments of ex-girlfriends and burned bridges. Way down past the grudges and dislikes and fears. Way, way down underneath the tombs. Way, way, way down there, there is a compartment where I can't talk. It is not that I won't talk, it is that I can't talk. I have eyes and ears and a nose but where my mouth should be, there is not a mouth. There is just skin. Skin and then a chin. The compartment is a room. There is no one else in the room. Except one person. There is one person in the room. She is my mother. She does not talk all the time, nor is she silent all the time. The room is small enough that we have to look at each other. Sometimes I feel where my mouth should be. Sometimes I feel like I've never had a mouth. Other times I have a vague memory of it being there. I wonder if I slowly, over a matter of years sewed it shut. I seem to remember using smaller and smaller stitches. Stitches so small that they were invisible to the naked eye. Stitches that dissolved into my skin as the mouth wound healed. There was a faint scar just under my nose. An area where the stubble didn't grow. A line where I used to draw my fingers in nostalgia. Until one day that line disappeared and I forgot all about it. This compartment is full of ropes. The ropes are not suspended nor hanging from the ceiling. They are daisy chained and strewn about the floor. They are organized in order of length. The walls and ceiling are slate. The floor is bamboo. What does power look like wafting around the air? Is it a black cloud in the room? Is it a tied up elephant in the corner, it's arms and legs bound behind it? This compartment is a container for power. It contains power.