I am in a room with a door that does not open. I have been here a long time.
Voices tell me I must rest.
It is impossible to sleep your life away. I have tried and can tell you this hard truth. People who consider themselves healthcare professionals say sleep is essential. They tell you to establish a series of regular sleeping habits like going to bed at the same time each night, practicing relaxing activities like reading. They recommend exercise, low lighting, and deep breathing. They tell you to sleep when you are tired, but I am always tired, and still cannot skewer sleep. What the professionals don’t tell you is how to summon energy to go on when the world around you is so exhausting, Or is it that I exhaust myself with an interpretation of a world that is, like all of us, only trying to do its best?
A different kind of professional once told me that I am constantly collecting uncharitable interpretations.
I turn on a meditation tape and try to follow it, breathing with the bright and crisp voice of a woman who is trying just a little too hard to be soothing. “Hold for four seconds. Now out for five.” Her deep sighs annoy me, but I try because meditation is the best thing you can do to convince yourself that you’re practicing self-care and not making excuses for lacking interest in life.
Meditation.
Breathing.
Sleep.
It’s a business like everything else, aimed at the hopeful and desperate. Or maybe that’s just my skepticism speaking again.
I lower my lids and try to relax.
Relax.
Relax.
I can feel some ache like I’ve been straining my eyes. Even when they’re closed, they try to be productive. Best if I could just let them exist in the comfort of unseeing, unknowing. If I could let them live in the dark.
Whenever I manage to fall asleep, I go somewhere else.
In my dreams, I enter a hotel. No one is in the lobby, not even at the front desk, except for a figure in the distance, lying face down on the floor. I look around, seeing if there is someone who will help. I cry out but no one comes. No one to help or hurt.
I don’t want to approach the body on my own, but I do it anyway.
I am good at doing things I dislike.
As I get closer, I am startled by something I cannot see. Loud echoes of the roaring, shaking ground. I feel myself losing balance, and then…
I am back in my bedroom.
Fully awake.
On those nights when I wake with a start, I look out the window. I see everything and nothing, all at once, and I think, ah, yes.
This is my life.
Soundproof windows keep outside life away, keep whatever is meant to be quiet, quiet. It is often forgotten that windows are not just a means of viewing, but also bearers of sound, smell, light, and air. Of words no one else can hear, of the sounds of our mistakes.
Windows keep what’s inside in and what’s outside out.
Until someone opens them.
The windows here are floor-to-ceiling and open like the unfolding lids of a box. I hear steps outside my room day and night, but I don’t know who they belong to, even though I can guess the owners have more of a choice than I do when it comes to their presence here. Their steps vary throughout the day. I have learned to tell them apart by their pace and how much the ground shakes when they pass my door. One is slower, larger than the other, the one that feels more hurried and doesn’t press much against the floor. Both come and go without a word.
In my room, there is a small mirror attached to the door, a single chair made of clear plastic, a bed with a three-inch-thick mattress, a small glass table, and on it, a lamp in the shape of the world. The sheets on the bed are light grey and they match the color of the wall-to-wall carpeting. My steps make no sounds.
At sunset, new sounds come from inside. I imagine them to be the sharpening of swords or other weapons too heavy for me to yield. They clash and crunch, strong and weighted. I am too afraid of leaving my room to check. I have kept to myself all day, like every day. If I’m not counting this one, I’ve got seven more days to go before they say I can leave. At this thought, the sun parts the clouds and shines on me for a brief moment. Just one.
Today is a bleeding day so I’ve spent most of it lying down. When night comes, I will try to sleep so that the next morning I can make another tally mark on my wall of waiting.
Six days.
I wake up on what I think is the next day. It’s hard to tell when you sleep all the time just to escape life. Many people try to avoid monotony, but now, here, I want to become the monotony in hopes that it will ease my panic. Who needs anti-anxiety medicine when you can subdue yourself with your own despair?
I open the door to a small bathroom attached to my room. Less blood today. Perhaps I’ll have more energy. Energy to do what, write a postcard? “Wish you were here xoxo.”
I sit on the edge of the thin mattress and gaze out the window. I’m too high up to climb down, and even if I did make it to the ground in one piece, I’d be in an enclosed courtyard, just as trapped as before.
I cannot remember being anywhere else.
Where am I? How did I get here?
What is my name?
I cling to my pen as if it’s my mother and the paper I’m writing on is my father; the only safe things I have. I try to be brave, but I am not. In the middle of the night, I wake to screams that take me minutes to realize are my own.
Except tonight.
Tonight, the screams are coming from someone else.
Someone nearby.
Someone in my room.
Before I can react, a hand is tight over my mouth. It turns out I was the one screaming after all, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am not alone.
“If you keep shrieking like a dumb bird, they’ll hear you.”
I shut my mouth, my muscles clenching hard in the dark.
“I can get you out of here but only if you close your eyes and keep them closed the whole time.” “Who are you?” I manage to whisper, my voice cracking, so long has it gone unused.
“I will tell you afterwards. Once you are home, you can open your eyes and see.”
In the dark, now no longer alone, I consider my options and realize what I already know- that I don’t have many. I am a cornered king in an unmatched game of chess. “Why would you help me?”
“Because I would also like to leave this place, but in order to do that, I must have a package to deliver. You could be my package.”
It seems simple enough, except for one thing. “But how would we get out? The only way out is through the window.”
“Leave that to me.”
Can I take the chance? What is the alternative?
I close my eyes as this creature I cannot see wraps me up.
The glass of a broken window is the prettiest glass of all.
Look down at the ground. Do you see the shards? Are they inside the room? Or are they on the outside? If you don’t see any bits and pieces, then you know this story is not about something that broke in.
It’s about something that broke out.
As we fly outside, his talons clutching the bedsheets that held me, I can feel the wind against my cheeks, drying tears of happiness that leak from my shut eyes. I don’t need to see to feel like I am in the world again, like I am on my way home.
Soon, I will be myself again.
I keep my eyes closed. The fate of my life is in someone else’s hands and all I can hear is wind.
The time between my escape and my arrival is time spent in the night of myself. I stay awake so as not to accidentally open my eyes if and when I wake up, reminding myself of the promise I made. I don’t know what would happen if I fail to keep them closed.
I do not want to find out.
Remember, I am not brave.
“Open your eyes.”
I fell asleep despite my efforts. The dark was so soft and my body swinging in its lovely hammock against the wind lulled me into the most calming peace.
My awakening is not as peaceful. As soon as the voice speaks, I feel such pain, as if my entire body is being squeezed into a vacuum, suffocating me, pressing the air right out of me. I now truly know fear. Fear of being trapped forever in a space smaller than any room. I am being suffocated. I try to scream with all the power in my little lungs but no sound comes out.
“Open your eyes.”
For a moment, it seems I might be dead.
I try to scream again and find that I can breathe.
I scream and scream and scream.
“Open your eyes.” This time the voice sounds louder, like it’s coming from much closer than before.
“Open your eyes!” It shouts and though my eyelids shoot open from the force of the command, I can barely see, surrounded by bright lights and blurry shapes moving all around me. I am no longer in my traveling cocoon, and I can see the creature now. She is a large woman with long arms and hands bigger than my face. I’d be frightened except… she’s smiling at me. Her face looks like love. I try to say hello, but it comes out a scream. This only makes her smile grow, despite how tired she looks. It must have been a long journey and we stared at each other, both exhausted and yet not wanting to look away or close our eyes, not even for a moment.
When I grow up, I will not remember my birth, but I’ll remember the feeling I got the first time my mother saw me.
I’ll remember it every time she looks at me.
Every time she smiles.