Despair

I stared at the light in the ceiling of my cell. Its filthy opaque cover turned the light that bled forth into a dull, sickly orange that smothered everything. It clouded my mind, darkening my thought. But I couldn't shut it off; I was powerless to affect it. So I rolled over in my makeshift bed - a small cubicle set two feet into the wall - and pulled shut the blackout curtains that were my sole comfort, giving me some control over my situation. The act threw me into total consuming darkness This was my relief from the light. When I slept, it was dark; when I was awake, the dead, orange light was just on the other side of the thick curtain. It was a freakish attempt to resemble day and night, but it was all I had.

Since I could no longer see my confining walls, it gave me some semblance of freedom. Darkness blocked out the hopelessness, letting my mind roam free. A thousand worlds were born at the dying of my orange sun. I was no longer in a tiny, harsh cell, but wherever I could imagine. This was the first step into madness.

I didn't know how long I'd been in this hell. I had no watch, and nothing happened that I could judge time with. The only break in the monotony was the food tray they shoved through a small slat in the door. Even that wasn't at a specific time; it merely happened within each twenty-four hours. Usually I got one meal a day - I didn't need that much, it wasn't as though I was doing anything - though sometimes they even forgot that. I frequently contemplated jut not eating, ending my torment, but my fear of the unknown held me to this suffering. Even missing a meal was a change, a break in the pattern that I was always grateful for.

I filled my days with music, writing, painting. In the cabinets above and below me I had found a guitar, a flute, pens, pencils, paper, paintbrushes, paint. I didn't understand why they were left there; I didn't understand why I was allowed to stay barely one step away from insanity. Was it only to torture me? Why this madness? What had I done to deserve this? Nothing. One morning I had simply woken up here. The thought drove me crazy. There was no reason to why I was here. None at all.

But I did not think about those things. Instead, I made goals: to write a song, to sculpt a story, to paint the perfect woman. Because without the comfort of ideas, of characters, of melodies filling my head and my cell, I would have died from the overwhelming nothingness. As it was, I slept as long as I could: less time awake meant less time trying to busy myself, less time trying to keep myself sane. I refused to think about the endless days stretching out before me: I had let myself think too much once before and I knew how destructive it could be. I had simply panicked at that point - panicked with the uncertainty of not knowing whether I would ever get out; panicked with the certainty that I never would. I remembered the room growing smaller and smaller as the panic closed in on my mind, tightening until it suffocated me - and that only made me panic more. I tried so hard to get out: tried to claw my way out of the two doors in my cell, clawed the thick wood until my fingers bled; slammed my body against the doors and the walls until I was in too much pain to continue. The hopelessness overwhelmed me and I tried to knock myself out, slamming my head against every available surface just so I would not have to feel or think anything for a while. But the more pain I inflicted on myself, the angrier I got that someone could put me in a place like this; that they could cause an innocent person to become so utterly hopeless that thy would do anything not to feel the mind-breaking terror of nothingness, of being so alone. I screamed and cried and yelled and sobbed in anger and emptiness until my eyes were swollen shut, until I had no voice; until my broken, bruised, and swollen body lay quietly on the floor, in far too much pain to crawl to bed. But even the pain was a distraction from the repetitious nothingness that surrounded me every hour, every minute, every second. And eventually I did sleep, dropped gratefully into the dream-filled slumber that I longed for every waking moment. And it all went away - for a little while. Until the insanity began to invade my dreams.

The scorching sun beat down on me as I looked across the shimmering, bone-white desert sand. The shattered and worn remains of my guitar lay all around me; my paper, brittle and yellow, was strewn across the wasteland; my dry and broken pens lay half buried in the ten-thousand year old dirt. Even my paint had been poured out onto the hot sand, almost faded now to white by the sun. And not even a breeze whispered across the dead earth to relieve me.

I jerked myself awake, but immediately slept again, and a new dream swept down like a vulture on not-yet-dead prey.

I knelt in a small rowboat with no oars in the middle of a still ocean, sat on the salty black water and knew that there were no fish under the surface, knew that there was no seaweed, knew that there were no gulls. I sat and knew that the hot, empty water was dead, had never lived, could never live. And the boat never rocked.

At that point I forced myself awake; through my pain and exhaustion I forced myself to rise because even my dreams could kill me. With each muscle screaming, I pulled myself to my bed and lay there whimpering in the dark until the pain subsided.

The exhaustion overcame me, I was helpless to prevent it, I was terrified to sleep again for fear of the dreams that were worse than the reality. And I screamed.