The dripping of water. The buzzing of the lights. Breaths, in and out, an unending constant. I’ve lost track of the days, never seeing the light, that of the sun that is as the artificial ones over head never cease.
When I first moved into this room I tried to keep track, jotting down each day in my notebook to cover the passage of time, but what is time without a clock? I couldn’t even track my sleep, the sheet pulled over my head hardly shielding my eyes from the fluorescent’s intensity.
A year for my own good they told me. A year is what they promised but at what point does a year become an eternity when my only company is my unwell thoughts.
No books, no news, just the steady drip and buzz of humanity’s decay; the break down of their ingenuity.
The bulb started to flicker and I counted its intervals, grasping for any sense of the duration of my stay… my apparent captivity. Three hundred and thirty one was all it gave me. A finite number of flickers before dulling my room. I don’t even recall what I measured between each jolt of light; seconds, minutes?
I paced the room, always counting, a never ending stream of numbers with no meaning while looking for a door, a crease, something. Where would they even retrieve me from when the year ended?
My eyes were shot, my vision fading, or was it the lights? Had I lost another?
Meals came and went but how? I never spied a soul and yet they would always arrive in the middle of the room, scent buried by my own malodorous stench.
What was life like outside of this prison? To smell flowers, or the mustiness of a coming storm again… to feel the warmth of the sun and the beads of perspiration that spring up along my skin like the thin sheen of oil along the water’s surface…
Just a year… they said just a year…
Chris Kauzlarich 