My door has been locked for 3 years, 8 months, and 26 days. I have explored this 25′ x 25′ room over and over again. Waking, pacing, eating, searching, sleeping, and then starting the process again for 3 years, 8 months, and 25 days. It took less than a week for it to become my monotonous routine. Doing it over and over and over again…
Some nights, after a long day of pacing and pacing and pacing, nightmares consume me. I scream, even after I wake, with no one to console me. No mother to hold me close, no father to check under my bed for monsters. But in this room, with its broken toilet in one corner and a too-small blanket and ratty pillow in another, there is no place for the monsters to hide. Or at least, that’s what I thought.
For 1 year, 6 months, and 19 days, I’ve been thinking about the bare door, locked from the outside. For 1 year, 4 months, and 7 days, I’ve pondered the fact that this eternal darkness I’ve been shrouded in has become comforting. That the unidentified meat that falls through a hole in the ceiling is appealing to me. That I can’t remember a day when there weren’t voices echoing through my mind.
It took me 2 years, 2 months, and 7 days to realize that the bare door was to keep something inside, not keep something out. It took me 2 years, 4 months, and 19 days to realize that the reason why there’s no one to console me, why there’s no mother to hold me close, no father to check under my bed for monsters, why there’s no one to protect me….is because they can’t save me…..from me.
The literary magazine of Hagerstown Community College