The Prisoner

A short story.

The smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in my room, an overflowing ashtray sits on my windowsill against permanently closed blinds. It is always dark here, the only sounds are silence interrupted by the occasional pattering against the window. I imagine the world outside through the sounds of passing cars on wet asphalt and overhead airplanes flying through cloudy dark skies. Perhaps these are foundless sounds I create to instill a sense of normalcy, an unreachable world beyond my own where time passes. My unilluminated room sits hidden away, unseen and unheard from. The hands of a clock on the wall spin and spin incessantly, powered not by time but by depleting batteries. Here time is still, stagnant air. Occasionally the sky is set alight and my shutters faintly glow, outlining my corporeal world for a brief moment before the darkness resumes. 

 
In the complete darkness I am unsure where the world ends and I begin. I am unsure where my memories end and I begin, or if there is even a difference. I exist as part of the world, I am not inhabiting it, merely a figure contained within it, like the chair where I sit, I fade into the walls and floor of my entire world. I am a part of the ground, a part of the air. Where do I end the world begins? I remember there are others outside this place. Do they know where they end? Do they know how the melt into one another? A shapeless mass, hills and valleys of this world they believe they inhabit but are only as crucial as a blade of grass in an unlit field, as a cloud in the dark sky, wisps of smoke that curl around one another, disconnected yet held together like clumps of earth. 

 
Where do I end and the others begin? Where do we end and the cities begin? Formations of rock against a night sky, stamped out cigarette butts protruding from an ashy plain. Words on a page that run together, briefly highlighted by eyes that scan and forget, in minds that waste away. The memories run together, days and weeks and months and years are smoke that rises then dissipates into the ether, forming again in another's mind. Room temperature and body temperature are one. I can't feel the world against my skin, I can't differentiate the clumped mass of memories and existence in my mind, I can't see the darkness anymore. I can only feel myself fade into collective dark air we can no longer feel, finding solace in the knowing that eventually the memories will end, and the experience will no longer begin.