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I was starting to really get tired of brown. Brown walls, brown wooden flooring, brown sagging furniture, brown everything.
It ate at me, devouring my desire to seek out any other color of life. Even black was more preferred.
Brown was just bleak and the color of dirt—the same place everyone ends up in.
Days, weeks, months—I couldn't say how long I had been staring at the same fucking color, but it was starting to become a living reminder I was still a prisoner, my family and friends and boyfriend had no clue if I was gone or dead, and my whereabouts—well, let's just say that I was in the middle of nowhere.
It made my mind start to wander down dark corridors I try not to trek—what if no one cared I was gone? What if no one noticed? What if they just decided to give up and move on? What if—
"Stop," I gritted my teeth, snapping my imaginary jaws at whoever dared enter my mind, "just stop."
Exhaustion stemmed from every single ounce of my being. I couldn't flag down every attack that was planted in my head, and I wasn't strong enough to put up a wall. I had been writing off how many times I had been here, on the floor, begging for release, my hands chained, my body broke.
My mind. . .
"Just stop!" Course and raw was all I could feel as I tried to end the suffering being brought upon me. A thousand chaotic whispers all clinging to one morbid and haunting reckoning—no one knew if I was alive. No one knew where I was. No one was coming for me.
No one.
The second I found silence was the second he came back.
I didn't cower. I was tired of cowering. I was tired of a lot of things. Fighting—that was the most tiring challenge of all. Keep fighting. That's what my dad would say. Never stop. Don't give up.
"You look like hell," Lucas was wearing the same stagnant black shirt and jeans he always wore, aside from the ever changing array of shoes he had collected. He was wearing boots today. I didn't bother to look up—my knees felt like a permeability of rocks, coiffed to the floor, wrists nearly bleeding from how hard I regularly yanked at the chains. Hoping, in some naive way, it'll happen to break. And upon my trials, burn marks were just another living reminder I was no where near getting out of here.
Hoarse breaths fell short from my lips. Feeble attempts at chuckling made me feel even worse. I didn't say anything nevertheless.
I didn't have to. Lucas made most of the conversation. Like this was a casual diplomatic discussion and me not tethered to a rack.
There was a sigh that suddenly drew from his lips. When his shoes approached me, boots scuffing eerily against the wooden hardboard, I scattered back, spine pressed into the wall opposite of me. My hair protected me from having to meet his eyes—I could keep something of a curtain shielding me from the one person I despised.
