Lies

I wonder if there is an anger hiding inside, an ague beyond the slightest shivers. Tell me, wise doctors, is everything black and rotting inside my far-too-white bones?

Conversations are questions and answers. Here, the shadows eat the answers. They leave me alone with myself in the dark, in the unknown. Most shadows are thin, black, lifted easily like a veil in sunlight. Not these. The shadows on this wall never leave.

I sit in the middle of the cell, legs crossed, eyes closed. The silence hangs in the air, no screams, no shouts. Maybe today will be a good day.

Lies.

I want to lean against the walls. They look so convenient. But I know better. The second I touch those shadows, they pull me in. Gnaw at my neck. Tear the skin from my arms. This cell doesn’t kill me. That’s the cruelty. The world took away all my life, but it doesn’t allow me to die; the shadows leave like they never committed a crime, but the next day they come back, and repeat.

I stay right where I am, in the middle of my dark cell, too tired to break, too alive to be dead. I have been here for 113 days. I stared at my fingers in front of me, then at the bars, followed by the walls of the dead end beyond the bars and eventually, there was nowhere further to look.

Time slips under our noses. It tells us there are still numbers to count, that we can change, improve. So why are my numbers unglued? They land sloppily on the ground, one by one. Somewhere out there is someone my age. My gender. A completely different fate. Is that fair?

I wait in silence for an answer I know doesn’t exist, listen to the drops of freezing water as they leak from the ceiling - just like they do every winter, on repeat.

This water may never grow warm, this torture may never end. But this life will. I wonder how I will die.

Death is the void between a nightmare and a daydream, between every emotion that ever existed, so you see everything but feel nothing. Nothing at all. Here I am, searching for the void in between, wondering why those who deserved to live had to die and those who want to die are forced to live.

When those seven tornadoes crashed, the sky erupted in white flames no one had ever seen before. For a second, I saw the void open. I know it exists because I saw it, right behind my eyelids where only the truth is told. Then it vanished, gone before I could feel it in my palm.

I know what they did. They ruined all that mattered to me - my parents and the environment. Those two things were the only connections I had. And both died the moment the white flames came alive.

Now, the Earth isn’t orbiting. It’s sinking; I can smell it even from underground - the smell of smoke from a forest burning far away, the scent of toxic water that is seeping into the ground and poisoning the last of underground aquifers.

Light is hard to find in a place like this. The closest thing is Pierre, the oldest guard with a scruffy white beard that peeks out of his helmet. He only does rounds in this tower about once a month, but one time I heard him yelling to a cocky guard about kicking a prisoner. The other guards despised him, but he didn’t seem to care. Occasionally, he would nod and slip me a slice of cheese. Eventually I accepted that he was the closest person I had, even though I never said a word to him. The cheese reminded me too much of the times I watched the Sunrise while eating breakfast. So I decided to feed it to a rat. I was only trying to be gentle, but the small creature scurried out of the cell - frantic, scared.

I hated that rat. It disgusted me. It abandoned me when I was just trying to be nice.

Lies.

I hated that rat because even animals are scared of me. I hated that rat because it still remembered how to escape, how to leave.

I was so jealous. I was so angry.

Now I’m starting to get used to it. I eat the cheese and don’t think about the Sunrise. I sit quietly in my cell and don’t wish for the day things may change.

The guards are doing their daily patrols, always at random times, always whispering underneath their huge helmets as if I wouldn’t hear. Their job is easy, their tempers horrible. I hate the clank of their metal armour and the screeching drag of their swords on the stone floor. I don’t care what they think of me or my situation. Or at least I shouldn’t.

I am nothing.

Then I am too much.

I lose everything.

My own voice plays in my head, all the thoughts I tried to forget. It’s like my mind secretly recorded them so I would never ever forget the darkness.

“Happy is a calculated lie so you get to wear frills and lace and something like a memory of a smile when they murder you in the dark. Out of my leftover kindness I can make a joke about it and you can pretend to laugh, like you always do…repeat repeat.

Someone pressed endless repe-“

I want to dissolve into one of the corners and pretend I was never here. But all I can do is rock, back and forth back and forth like a maniac because I know how that ends. I know it too well. I know it’s the loop I’m trapped in, the marathon of survival with no finish line, no prize, no one. I never want to finish that thought - ever. Because I can’t face the truth, even when I know it. I am every bit the coward everyone thinks I am.

The shivers. They spread from a tiny twitch of my toe to the quaver in my breath until finally, my bones start thrashing and shaking while my flesh stays still and blood is drawn. I am in agony on the inside, completely still on the outside. I am so cold.

Has it already been a month? Is it the coldest time of the year again? How long until all the numbers fall off?

I want to laugh at myself for throwing questions in the air and expecting something.

Please let there be anything.

CLANK. When my eyes snap up I see only metal and stone.

It is boring.

Lies.

It drives me mad.

The same dirty tray, every day, never washed but never different, slides onto the stone floor through the same gap between the metal bars. Through the guard’s metal-covered faceplate I can still recognise the expression every guard wears.

His eyes.

They are my first real thought after months of my own words played on repeat, whispering darkness and nightmarish voices.

Gods, what is this?

The guards here are old, or middle-aged. I can tell from their drunken gait. The scars on their hands. The hardness in their eyes — toughened by years of this job. Years of mad people like me.

But this pair is a breathtaking blue, so blue compared to the grey I see all day, so blue it looks like a glass window painted with heaven. It makes me think of the Sun, the clouds, the warm wind on my cheeks and lazing on a float in the pool.

Delusions.

Because I want to gouge out his eyeballs and hold them in my hands and this blue can be the best friend I never had. I want to snuggle in this thought, capture this moment with my mind and dream of this sweet colour when I go to sleep.

The tray is at my feet - filled with something I can’t recognise. Sometimes it’s a slop with brown bits, and other times it’s buns stuffed with a bitter paste. We are all required to be seen to take one bite so we don’t starve, so we can continue to

choke on our own madness and nibble off all 10 of our fingers like broken toys. Every meal reminds me of the world’s cruelty.

But today, I am reminded of something different - I am reminded of how close a nightmare and a daydream can get, yet still be completely different. Because he is right beyond the bars, yet separated by a single fact spanning miles and miles - I am a prisoner and he is a person with a life. I sit next to my food, a green bowl of slush, but I stare straight at him. It doesn’t make sense. His eyes are so kind, sparkling when this cell is so dark.

Then I remember what the people in uniforms said as they shoved me in here and locked everything away.

“You will be isolated in your own space, free from the pain others inflict on you,” they said.

Liars, I said.

Here I am free from happiness, free from my own home, free from love, free from sanity. How can the man with blue eyes be anything but my own hallucination?

I sink into the ground, green slush forgotten, summers and warmth gone the way the dripping water goes - dripping, then nothing.

Help me?

Someone?

Nothing.

My head is curled into my chest, eyelids like heavy weights pressed against my eyes. Silence follows, no sound from behind the bars. My heart sinks. I was right. No blue eyes ever existed and maybe the last of the numbers have started to slip.

“Christine.” A name is whispered beside my left ear, like a ghost in my dreams even though I am too pained to be dreaming.

The name sounds familiar, warm, a single word.

A single bolt of lightning down my spine.

Dear gods.

It’s my name.