Trapped

I think I fell asleep. There was no real way of knowing—no clock, no windows, no people to tell me, but one moment I was sitting on the floor with my back up against the creaky metal bed, and the next I was sideways, my head on the concrete floor, aching from having ended up in an awkward position on a hard, uncomfortable surface. I rubbed my eyes, which were only half open, and forced myself to look around.

Crippling disappointment ravaged through me as I remembered where I was. For one blissful moment, I had forgotten; lying there with my eyes shut, I could have been anywhere, but then I had to go and spoil it all by opening them.

The room was identical to how it was before, but as I sat up, rubbing at my dully throbbing head, I noticed something by the door.

A tray.

And on that tray, was food.

Ridiculous but undeniable hope surged through me. The tray, which had most definitely not been there before, was at least some kind of proof that there was life out there. I had assumed that someone was beyond that door—after all, someone had to have locked me up in the first place, and there must be a reason for that, but I’d never had any proof. For all I knew, they could have locked me in here for some cruel, twisted reason and then left, abandoning me altogether until I starved or died of dehydration.

But I hadn’t been abandoned. Someone, quite possibly the sick and twisted person who had brought me here in the first place, had brought me food.

I looked at the plate. I had to admit; it wasn’t very exciting food. There was bread, an apple, an orange and some water. Healthy, yeah, but my diet was the least of my worries right now.

I ate the bread greedily—I hadn’t realised until now just how hungry I was—but as I picked
up the apple, some sense of reason in my mind told me not to eat it. After all, I had no idea how long it was going to be until I got more food. I doubted I was going to be getting three good meals a day, and if they only gave me this much every twenty-four hours, I was going to have to make it last. There had been enough bread to make me reasonably full; I’d been told in the past that I had the appetite of a bird anyway, so I saved the apple and the orange, drinking half the water before placing it all neatly on the desk, arranging it again and again in an almost obsessive manner.

I had an excuse. I was bored. Bored out of my fucking mind. Scared, yes, but now that I had been in here for who-knew-how-long, the fear was being replaced by this frustrating boredom.

And then I noticed the paper on the desk.

There was so much of it; a great wad of paper, all piled up to perfection, with a selection of pencils lined up beside it in almost creepy neatness.

Inexplicably cautiously, I picked up a pencil, and slid the first sheet of paper off of the pile, perching on the edge of the little, metal chair, which groaned with age as I sat on it. I didn’t like writing in pencil—I was normally quite a fast writer, and the scratching sound that the lead made against the paper made me shiver, but now was not a time to be picky.

Despite my burst of insanity earlier, the sleep seemed to have done me good. Although I could feel the anger bubbling like lava in a dormant volcano within me, I was able to suppress it for now with a few deep breaths and rational thoughts, which was abnormal for me, but a pleasant surprise. I had never been a logical person, but desperate times called for desperate measures, didn’t they?

So I headed the first page Day One. I had no idea of time, so I was going to have to put it down to the fact that every time I slept and woke up, it was a new day. It was hardly a reliable way of keeping track of time, and it was almost certainly incorrect, but it was the only way. I could try and work out a pattern in how often I was brought food, but if there were hours in between each session, it would become hard to work out just how many hours there were. So I went with the sleeping patterns. After all, even though I might have only been resting for a short while, now felt like a new day compared to yesterday’s horrifying delirium. Back then, I really felt I was losing my mind. At least now I felt I had regained a little bit of it.

I wrote in my neatest handwriting. I was hardly in a hurry, after all.

I then left a line, and placed the pencil on the line below, biting my bottom lip gently with my front teeth. What to write?

Another thought occurred to me at that moment:

Why was all this paper here? They had provided me with nothing else. No TV, no sports equipment, no computer, no books, nothing. But so much paper. It was like...like they wanted me to be doing this.

And why should I do what they wanted? They had locked me up for no good reason.

Who even were the 'They' that I kept going on about?

Stubbornly, I threw the pencil down. I chucked it so hard that it clattered into the wall, leaving a little mark where the tip had struck, and then rebounded onto the desk.

Why should I do what They wanted me to do? They presumably wanted me to write. Why else would They have provided me with more paper than was in a large book, and yet absolutely nothing else?

I could feel the tears that I refused to shed welling up again. I was not going to cry. Once I cried, everything was lost.

Nevertheless, the insanity was coming back again. The lava was beginning to boil up, and the volcano was about to erupt. I noticed how my nails were subconsciously digging themselves deeper and deeper into the flesh of my palms, and I hastily forced them out. Already, the marks in my skin were deep red, although the blood hadn’t quite come to the surface.

I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t even noticing when I hurt myself. I was just doing it, as though it was the most natural thing. Even after drawing my nails out of my hand, I could feel them desperately digging back in. Pain was almost a relief...it controlled the rising anger within me.

Why was I here? Why the hell was I here?

My mind was a hurricane. Thoughts rushed and spun around too quickly for me to comprehend. And through the hurricane, I saw once again into the depths of insanity.