For three weeks on end I had isolated myself in my room too scared to do anything but wait and see which would come first; being turned into a play thing or being killed.
I would only attend breakfast and dinner.
For the first few days whenever the phone rang and the woman on the other end would tell me to come down for lunch; which would have been served in fifteen minutes, I would decline before cutting the call. This had happened for exactly five days and I would spend ten hours holed up in my room with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company.
I'd had too much time, too little space and absolutely nothing to do. It had been dreadful. Boredom had infested my mind and my thoughts had become my greatest enemy.
On the sixth day I had risked asking if my lunch could be brought to my room, I had been fully prepared for my request to be denied but that had not happened; fifteen minutes after the call a knock had sounded on my door and that sweet voice had asked if it could come in or leave my lunch at the door.
I had wanted to see the owner of that voice so I had opened the door and on the other side had stood a middle aged woman with skin rich with melanin like my own and the softest eyes I had ever seen. I had not known it then but she would become the closest thing to a mother I would grow to have and the one to hold my hand in the best day of my life.
The moment she saw me she smiled sweetly and her features softened, her presence calmed me instantly. From that day on I had asked my lunch to be brought up to my room which at the time I had referred to - in my mind - as my cell.
She had been the one to always bring my food and seeing her had, for the second week, been a reprieve from the monotonous and dull hours of my days until it too blended into the routine that had weighed on my mind slowly crushing it forcing it to either bend or break.
One would have expected being left alone not being bothered by anyone to have been calming, something I should have been grateful for but I had found it to be just as bad as it would have been if I had been bothered.
I was bored and had too much time to spare. My feelings were a chaotic mess that had not let my mind rest peacefully. I would wake and watch the dawn sky, the only thing I had found beautiful in those days, go to breakfast, come back to spend five hours in my room wondering what was to come next, crying, hating those that betrayed me, cursing them and the people I stayed with, wanting justice and revenge but fear had kept me from doing anything because despite it all I still wanted to live.
At lunchtime for a few minutes my thoughts and feelings would disappear as that woman busied herself with setting up my lunch on the oval table and when she had left I would take longer than necessary to eat because after finishing I would go back to worrying for another four hours.
An hour before dinner I would take a thirty-minute shower before answering the cell that would tell me dinner was in thirty minutes. Thirty minutes I would spend getting dressed and gathering strength to be able to sit in the same table with the people who had stolen my life away from me and subjected me to a life filled with terror, and not break.
When the knock sounded on the door telling me another sibling was waiting to take me to dinner, I would open the door greet them like I had greeted the one from the morning before we went to dinner.
After dinner for two hours I would sit on the balcony with a pillow in my arms before I would go inside and dose off, but not before silently praying I did not dream and that the following day would be just as uneventful as that one had been.
On the third week into my isolation I had been struggling to breathe, I had been suffocating. Each passing second would be longer than the last, my thoughts louder than before and paranoia ate away of my mind with fear making the whole thing worse with each minute that passed.
While previously I had spent most of the day inside, I started to spend more and more time on the balcony but even that had not been enough, I had needed more space, something new.
The need to do something—anything—grew with each second, minute, hour and day that passed until my fear could not hold me prisoner any longer. Until fear was not enough to stop me from opening the door to my room and stepping out.
For nearly three full weeks I had stayed tucked away my immediate problem being my mental state which has been crumbling but after that day things changed and I still wonder if I would be where I am today had I stayed in my room.
Yes, I wonder...
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Rooted from Betrayal
ActionI would have had a normal life, with mundane problems and simple joys. I would have started practicing as a general doctor by the age of 24 with intentions of specializing and later becoming a neurosurgeon. I would have lived a normal life far from...
