Archive of Our Own ^beta

Silence. Nothingness. No one and nothing for miles on end. You could walk all the kilometers it would take to travel the earth and you would be met with the land stripped to its bones. Bare.

There were no other humans. Just you. There were no other creatures. Just you.

The loneliness had not caught up yet, and you felt as if you belonged everywhere and nowhere. But not here. You still thought you couldn't see. In a sense, you were blind. Blind as to what you had and hadn't done. Blind as to what those around you were doing. Blind as to what you touched, smelled, heard, felt, tasted, sensed. You continue to be blind. But now there is something more.

Still, you felt content for some incomprehensible reason. Even as your feet stopped moving, you felt content. Even as your eyes wandered around yourself, desperately searching for something to concentrate on, for something to gaze upon, a corner, a line, a color, a singular human being, even as you lost yourself, you felt content. 

And still you decided to walk. You knew there was nothing up ahead. Nothing more than what surrounded you already, but instead you insisted. You walked. You walked and you ran and you sprinted and tumbled down. Your knees did not bloody. They couldn’t, or else they would ruin the perfect blankness of the ground. Hurt they did, though. The pain was excruciating, and you wondered if, in this incredibly white world surrounding you, there was an imperfection, a small rock formation, a sharp stick, anything that you could use to ground yourself. Anything you could use to relate yourself back to what was normal. 

You did bruise, bigger and blacker than you’d ever seen. Your hands were red and your knees were blue, if you could feel anything anymore, you would have found it ironic, perhaps even funny. Again, you began to walk. 

It didn’t feel physically exhausting, as the body didn’t know it was walking. It only felt as though you were standing in the same desperate position, idle. Your brain knew better, but it was a cunning liar, and would not tell anyone else what it knew, not even you. 

That feeling of loneliness began creeping back to you, climbing through your feet to your legs, reaching your back and neck, spreading a coldness you had never felt before. Although, even if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t know. You didn’t remember anything from before this time. 

Even your brain was blank. 

Your body knew, though. And it was good at keeping secrets from your brain as well. It knew the feeling of comfort and happiness enough to make you feel uncomfortable and lonely. It knew that you were not where you were supposed to be, and yet it refused to tell your brain nor you. You could almost hear their bickering, but you shouldn’t have been able to. 

So you just kept walking. 

You walked and walked for hours on end. Or it could have been minutes. It could have been seconds, it could have been years. You weren’t sure how time passed in this realm, but you knew you had to keep walking.

There was something here, there had to be. It was pulling both your brain and your body in its direction and you knew it had to exist. 

It had to. 

Or else this would have been useless. This would have been worthless. This fight between your thoughts and your feelings, the lying between your body and your brain, it would have all been for nothing. 

You pushed that feeling and those thoughts away, and you increased your pace. It would not tire you, after all, so what would have been the point of keeping a steady pace. Slow and steady would not win any races in this world. So you ran. 

You ran forward, and when your breath became raggedy, and you realized your lungs were going to turn blue, you sat. You sat and you stared. You looked up and down, left and right, unsure of which direction was which; you knew that you looked every side possible, however, so left and right or right and left, up and down or down and up, right and down or up and left, you had seen all that was to see. 

But the feeling of lonelines continued to slither itself up your neck and into your hair, down your nose and into both your eyes, burning them and causing water to leak through. It slithered back down your throat, tickling you in a way that burnt all that could have been left of your sanity. You were gone, one way or another. You had already lost yourself in this forest or desert that you were standing upon. What more could you stand to lose by getting rid of your sanity? Your friendships? You never had any in the first place. Your life? It had already been taken from you once you had stepped foot inside this place. 

So yes, you had nothing to lose.

This place could have been a miracle to some. You didn’t feel tire nor hunger, nor did you feel thirst. Cold and heat were a concept far away. You simply existed. And this you only knew because of the philosophy, ‘I think therefore I am’ and you did think. At least you thought so. 

But all that was blown away by a wind that was nonexistent when you decided to continue walking. 

Because, yes, even though you’d felt all drops of sanity sucked out from this white hole, you knew what you had to do. You had to walk. 

You could faintly remember someone or something telling you that you had to keep walking foreward, no matter how tiring the road or how bothersome the people around you were, you had to keep going foreward. And since neither of those things were quite the issue at hand, you were going to be perfectly fine by walking, and once you found your way out of there, you would thank whoever had given you advice, and advise them in return to never step foot in this palace of utter and utmost transparency. 

And you continued walking. The loneliness that had since enveloped you had turned into something darker. Stronger. It blew in your ear. It screamed and shouted. It bellowed here where all would be echoed back tenfold. 

You soon began to realize what the loneliness had turned to. It was bitter. It was vile. It was threatening. It was such a feeling of isolation and forlorn solidarity that the word was stuck on your tongue. You felt… sad. 

You hadn’t felt sad before, you hadn’t thought about it at all. Not that you had felt happy either, but sadness was not something you expected. You expected a feeling of longing, of missing somethin or other that you couldn’t begin to remember. You expected to feel frustrated when nothing you did was bringing you any answers to all your questions, but you felt, instead, sad. 

It was safe to say you didn’t enjoy it. The feeling of sullenness that you had recognised had since developed into sadness, and that made you confused. That made you, in turn, angry. 

You kicked at the ground and nothing flew up. Your foot didn’t even feel the impact. You realized what you were feeling was useless. You sighed and you continued walking. More than sad, now, you felt bored. You wanted something exciting. Heck, you wanted anything to happen, other than your repeated cycle of stopping, walking, and running. Even your falling had been more interesting, and you were in pain because of that! You could still feel the pain, although it had dulled considerably now. It may have been the only thing anchoring you to consciousness, so you touched it once in a while to feel the rush of pain that went through your leg. And you. Kept. On. Walking. 

Hoping to notice even the slightest difference of the emptiness around you, you started taking a singular step, then stopping and glancing around yourself. At one point, you convinced yourself that something had changed because you swore you saw it from the corner of your eye. You kept yourself entertained for hours like this. Looking to your right, looking straight ahead, then noticing something weird through your periphiral view and turning quickly around to see what it was. Your anxiety was skyrocketing. 

That is, until you finally understood the mirroring effect that your newfound insanity caused. You blinked. You took many deep breaths and counted to a million and nine. The unruly number made you feel like what you were doing was real. You touched your face and hair, and noticed it was considerably longer. You must have resembled a dog person at this moment. Unwashed, long, messy hair. Eyes that were full of energy, yet the dark circles underneath told a different story. 

You didn’t know any of this for sure, however. So you did what any (in)sane person would do. You put your hands in front of your face and you started to cry. You held your hands together so tightly that each tear fell precisely in them, making a miniscule puddle of salty liquid form in your hand. 

It was easy enough to cry, because how long had you been holding in all of that sadness? All of that loneliness, all of that desperation? Once you learned how to, it was easy to tap into that and use it to its full potential. But what you saw almost made you want to cry longer. 

It was you. You looked the same as you had looked the last time you had seen yourself in the mirror. Hair fixed perfectly, every strand in its place, eyes not filled with mirth, but still healthy looking, skin smooth and shiny. As if you had only been there for a minute and a half. It hurt. 

It hurt, because you had thought that time had passed. You thought that by now, someone you knew was searching for you, looking behind every door, under every ocean, past every single tree. But no. To the people who must have known you, you could have been in the bathroom, or the shower, or in your room, listening to music. They must have had no idea. Who could blame them? Certainly not you. You knew nothing of them. You couldn’t judge them if they didn’t exist in your memory, but you could hope. And hope, hope was all that you had. Until it vanished from your own stupid plan. 

You knew you shouldn’t have broken away from your routine, you knew you shouldn’t have strayed, but you did anyway, and now you had to pay the consequences. The consequences being the loss of all hope. 

Still, you had your routine, and habits were hard to break, even harder to forget. So you kept walking. When you thought about habits, something old came to mind. A fact you had learned long ago. You had read it somewhere, or perhaps someone had told it to you, you may have even invented the thought right then and there in some desperate attempt your brain had of reassuring you. 

It went as such. 

"When one is used to a certain pattern of behaviour, it is all too easy to fall back into that rhythm even after a long absence. And there was one thing scientists and psychologists and poets were sure of: humans adored habits. The brain had ingrained heuristic techniques it used to understand a situation and create a sense of homeostatic balance so that the body could optimize all of its resources within a certain environment. 

Whether it was washing one’s hands for twenty seconds to feel clean. Or biting one’s nails when anxious to calm down. Or even eating lunch at that same time every day after the body had been trained to send hunger cues.

Habits were the cornerstone of a person. As important to their whole self as their inherent personalities are.

They were the ‘nurture’ part of that unity of ‘nature and nurture.’

And addiction was the greatest proof of the power of these habits. If someone addicted to, say, heroin is used to shooting up within the familiar comforts of their home or among certain friends, then what might have been a deadly dose to anyone else would merely have been enough to allow them to reach that perfect high. Because the body, so well trained in its habits, takes that environment as a cue to prepare the liver to mitigate the effects of the anticipated drug.

And drug resistance occurs simply when the body is well-trained on how to deal with an intruder.

Interestingly, if that same addict took that same dose of heroin in an unfamiliar environment, it was almost guaranteed that they would overdose and die. Because the brain had not developed self-protective habits for that unfamiliar surrounding, and did not know how to prepare for war.

Most humans did not understand just how powerful a habit could be.” 

And for some strange reason, you felt that resonated within you. You liked it. If it was simply something that your brain had created, you praised him, you praised him for coming up with such a thing, and if it was something you actually remembered, you might have thought you were getting close to exiting this never-ending nightmare. And that was light. It was light in this sea of darkness that presented itself in the color white. It was light where there wasn’t any, and you desperately reached for it. So then you began to walk. 

Putting your head up and smiling, you walked. Then, when you realized, after such a long time, that you couldn’t hear your own footsteps, you began to talk. Hello? Your mouth moved. 

“Hello?” the walls echoed. It was strange. You’d expected the echoing, but it wasn’t an echo, because your voice didn’t actually come out of your mouth. You wanted to know more. So you began speaking nonsense. 

Lilacs are not roses because roses can be drunk but lilacs can be eaten. You attempted to say.

“Lilacs are not roses because roses can be drunk but lilacs can be eaten!” The walls echoed back in a far more up-beat manner than you had meant for it to sound. You tried a few more times, walking and speaking, speaking and walking, walking and listening. 

Then, something unexpected happened. You spoke, and the walls answered. 

“What is a bird?” Your voice sounded from out of your mouth, and you gasped. 

“A bird is a creature capable of flying, and therefore able to escape any prison,” The walls bellowed back to you. Your eyes widened. The room was speaking to you! What joy! To be able to finally talk to some…one? Something? It didn’t matter. You could finally talk! You asked pointless questions. Why am I here? What did I do in my past life to deserve this? Is this karma for something I have done? And the walls answered vaguely. You are here because They wished for it to be so. You did positively nothing worth mentioning in your past life. It may as well be. 

Once more, the walls got tired of you. Or maybe they had decided that it was enough to give you so few answers and that it was time to leave you for the next thousand or so years. Or maybe… Maybe you had begun to regain some of your previous sanity. Whichever it may be, you were alone now. And the silence was anything but enjoyable. It wasn’t ominous, per say, but it felt threatening. It felt wrong. So you began talking to yourself again. It didn’t matter that the echo was gone and that your voice sounded so wrong. What mattered was that you could hear sound and that you weren’t one hundred percent sensory deprived. 

You talked and you talked, forming sentences you hadn’t even thought before. You created stories of things you hadn’t ever seen, and you practically wrote books from those stories. Even if no one, not even you would be able to enjoy those stories, you told them. Again and again, to no one in particular, until you were sure you could recite them backwards and forwards. And when you were tired of stories, tired of walking, tired of being, you laid down, and you slept. You slept peacefully, without dreams or nightmares, and you woke up feeling more tired than you were when you went to sleep. So you felt no need to do anything, other than stare. 

You stared at the ground, you stared at what you thought was the sky, you stared at your own freckle on your arm. And then you walked. This time, without a purpose. You knew nothing and you admitted it. You were lonely and you admitted it. You were sad and you admitted it. You missed the outside and you admitted it. But now that there was no more purpose for anything, you assumed you could just walk for all of eternity, knowing that at least you had admitted all that you wanted to. 

And for some psychotic reason, you enjoyed it. You walked through the curves that weren’t there, the roads that weren’t real, and the lakes that were non-existent. You walked and you laughed, almost as if recalling something you had done and telling it to a friend. 

You walked while slithering down the path. You crawled like a baby, you learned how to handstand and walk while handstanding, and you were proud of yourself. You made the path seem fun when it had been so boringly sad. 

Then you went back to walking. You tried to recall something, anything from your life, but all that you could remember was a sickening smell of sweat and dirt, and images you’d rather not recall. Maybe that was why you were here. To reflect upon those memories. 

Those images. Those smells. And reflect you did. You thought long and hard, and came to the realization someone must have been punishing you for something. You had yet to find out what. You sat on the floor, and you felt as if you were floating. You closed your eyes and hit your head. You bit your thumb and scratched at your neck. You wanted to think. But it was as the walls had said, there was nothing of importance that you did in your life. You could remember feeling lonely then too, fleeing from someone and hiding away in a room, much like you were trapped in now. 

You were a sickening human. At least, that was what your intuition told you. Because, as logic went, you wouldn’t be punished for being a good person all your life. But maybe you were seeing this wrong. Maybe this wasn’t punishment. Maybe it was protection from whatever was out there that you had to hide in a room from. Yes, that was it! That had to be what the walls had meant! You jumped in joy. You laughed at yourself for how stupid you had been in the past to even think that being imprisoned here was a bad thing. 

Yes, now you understood. You were just hiding in here until the bad thing went away. It couldn’t be anything else. Who in their right mind would punish someone by making them immortal of all things? When you couldn’t feel tired or hungry or thirsty, all those things had to be good, right? Indeed! 

So you walked and walked. Warmth filling you with every skipped step. You finally knew what was going to happen and you were ready for a door to appear any day now. 

Of course, you continued walking, as that must have been something the person who put you here tasked you to do, which is why it was so engraved in your mind. Walking must do something, right? Right. It was your first instinct and was therefore correct. 

So walking it is! 

You walked for hours, not feeling mentally or emotionally fatigued in the slightest, a task that would have sounded impossible to you when you first arrived here, yet now that you knew, was as easy as taking a single step. 

You looked through the whiteness, in the hopes that today might be the day the monster disappears. But every day, without fail, you saw nothing. Which was all right! Or so you kept telling yourself. 

But the days became longer, and they almost felt like weeks, and the weeks felt like months… and the months… 

You almost felt like you’d been stuck there for years. 

But that couldn’t be possible, the monster couldn’t have existed for so long, could it? No…

But maybe it never existed in the first place. Maybe your imagination created that whole monster as some justification for what happened to you. 

Maybe you just were that horrible person who deserved to be locked up forever, never seeing the light of day. 

Which you didn’t have any memory of viewing. That was weird. You knew that you had light, but you couldn’t remember anything about sun light. It was disturbing. It was suffocating. It was unbearable. 

You pulled at your hair in agony. You stretched your lips and bit your arm. You bit your tongue and hit your leg. 

You soon realized you felt numb. No matter how hard you bit and how badly you pulled, no hair was moved from your head and no blood was drawn. 

You just were. You simply existed in a single space. 

The physicist inside you could appreciate it. It was almost as if you were Schrödinger’s Cat. Alive and dead inside of the box. You laughed at the useless information you just remembered. 

Then you decided to lay down. You were wearing all white clothes all throughout this time, and you decided to take off your white slippers. You leaned against nothing and wiggled your toes in the nothingness surrounding them. They almost looked funny, in contrast to the white. 

You started laughing uncontrollably. You couldn’t understand why, but you were laughing loudly and uncontrollably from the image of your toes. You were tearing up and you felt like you couldn’t breathe anymore, but still you laughed. You laughed and laughed until the giggles that were left turned into whimpers. You were crying. Why? 

Then your whimpers ceased. And you got up. And then you started running. Imitating the actions of the tears that were streaming down your face. 

Mood swings such as these became common in your day to day life from then on. You would lay down crying, fall asleep, then awaken laughing until your body had to manually stop your breathing so you couldn’t laugh any more. After that you were angry, so you ran all around the place, which in turn made you sleepy, and the cycle repeated. Over and over and over. 

Meanwhile, as your body was doing things your brain didn’t understand, your brain was whispering to you. He kept on repeating the phrase “The end is never the end is never the end is never the end…” and you had no idea what any of it meant.

But like every. Single. Constant in your life, this, too, came to a halting stop. You just did nothing for a while. Nothing at all. You were just fine with simply existing. But then you started walking. 

This time felt different. This time felt special. This time, unlike all other times, unlike the times you were trying to trick the world into letting you go. You knew exactly where you were going. 

You would walk and walk until you arrived and there would be no sleep or distractions big enough to make you get side tracked from this quest. Because now you knew. Now you knew what your brain was trying to tell you. You knew why your body was doing what it was. You understood the whispers. You understood the vague answers. You understood why you had been sent to this place.

You chuckled at how long it had been since you saw your mother last. You chuckled when you thought of your father because yes, now you could remember how both of them looked. 

You laughed when you remembered your childhood. 

You laughed when you thought of that one bully.

You laughed when you thought of what you had been doing in your previous life that was so wrong.

You laughed when you finally realized that this punishment equaled exactly what you wanted. 

You laughed bitterly, humourously, mirthlessly, angrily, in all possible ways. Because now you knew how silly you had been. 

You picked up the pace and you ran on all sides. You ran towards what you thought were left, right, straight ahead, and backwards. You knew exactly where you were going but it didn’t matter which road you took. That was the truth, they all led to Rome!

You practically skipped to it. You sprinted, you flopped your arms backwards, letting the ‘wind’ carry them. 

You could feel tears forming in your eyes, and this was the first time they had been formed not of sadness, nor happiness, but of relief. Because now, today, you would escape this wretched solidarity. This mind prison. This was the day Schrödinger found out that the cat was alive. And this would be the day you were free from yourself, first and foremost. 

Oh, how you couldn’t wait. You would fix everything! You would finally make yourself and the people around you happy because you had changed. You would go to college and make friends, and you would go to therapy to try and get rid of all of the trauma you’d experienced. 

You would be practically reborn. 

As you came to a screeching halt, your eyes widened. This moment felt like it lasted forever. Your breathing seemed to stop and quicken at the same time and you didn’t know what to do about it. 

You took a deep breath in and held it. You prayed to whomever was listening for this moment to be real, for you to have actually found what you were looking for. 

Your eyes glistened, and your cheeks reddened. Your pupils had dilated so much that you would have been able to see in the dark. Your nose was running and tears were already forming rivers as they streamed down your face, and somewhere in the distance, you were sure you heard angelic voices singing. 

As you fell to your knees, you noticed the stinging sensation that you had so missed. You looked down at your white shorts, and noticed that they’d been dirtied. You smiled. They’d been stained. 

You saw that the tiny scrape was bleeding, and your smile grew wider. A droplet of your deep scarled blood bloomed onto the white ground. It had been stained. 

You ruffled your hair and chuckled, noticing that it didn’t fall back into its original position, but stayed in the air. This made you let out a giggle. 

You got back up and dusted yourself off. You walked two steps further, and your tear-stained cheeks tightened in a toothy grin. 

Getting down on the one knee you hadn’t scraped, you placed your hand on the soil. It felt just how you’d remembered it, soft, moist, natural. You placed it near your nose and smelled it. This was what nature smelled like. This is what you’d been missing all your life. This. 

But the thing you loved the most was that little hair-looking thing on the soil. Your tears began running again, falling on its leaves. 

You saw how it fell on the soil that was so excluded from everything else, and behind which lied a door. It looked like wood, and it was maude. You didn’t mind it though, you would have plenty of time to get back out, for now, you were going to focus on the thing before you, because from now on, you would always stop to smell the roses. You never knew when it would be the last time you did, after all. So you did. 

You looked at the string-like emerald plant in front of you. You remembered what children in your class used to tell you, what your parent used to say, what other people you met online would say, and you were ready to follow their advice. 

You reached out slowly, as if time would take you back to solidarity if you didn’t thoroughly take in this moment. You took out your index finger carefully, and placed it first on the leaf, as if you were afraid it would break.

Then you took out your thumb and caressed the singular leaf, placing it in between your two fingers. One by one, you took out all of your digits. Your middle finger, your ring, and your pinkie finger, all carefully aligned so they could pat the tiny green thing in front of them. 

With your other hand, you wiped the tear stains that had been left as marks on your cheeks. You laughed. You used both hands to caress it now. You took in the clean, fresh smell of it, the almost sticky smooth feeling it had on your digits, the way it tickled your palm. 

You noticed its roots peeking out from the soil, and covered it quickly. You didn’t want this marvel to dry out. Who knows, maybe there are some other lost souls out there who are in desperate need of it. 

If there were, you would be rooting for them, because there was nothing quite as harsh as what you’d gone through, and you hoped it would be easier for anyone else in your position. 

But now it was finally over. With one move, you got up and opened the door. 

You felt fulfilled, because you’d finally touched grass.