Instinct

2. The Beginning of the End

When the lights went out, Stephanie’s world diminished from a twelve by twelve cell of white walls and sterilized metal to the sound of her own breathing and the feeling of cold seeping up from beneath her. It hadn’t meant anything at first: only the end of another day locked up, exhausted, hopeless. She’d slept better that night than any other- and maybe the clue had lain in that very thing.

But as the night hours passed, and Stephanie woke in the dark as if time hadn’t passed at all, a tingle set up residence in her spine that never quite dissipated- a sense of wrong that wouldn’t leave her alone, despite all of her carefully constructed rationalizations.

Lights staying turned off for just a few hours longer than normal hardly meant the end of the world. So tired as she had become lately, it should have been a blessing. Yet, her eyes stayed pinned open in a desperate plea for the light that would allow her to see the walls around her that she had hated for so long.

As the hours turned into days, and the lights refused to humor her and flicker on, Stephanie became certain that no one was coming for her this time. The thought didn’t come to her slowly, nor all at once. She supposed the concept had always been there, lurking among the bones of fears both old and new, the worry that she’d be left behind once again and this time there’d be no fence to clear, no forest to escape into, no one to run to.

With the lack of light, the days lost meaning.

Stephanie didn’t know when she slept, didn’t know for how long. This timeless, cold hell made a few minutes feel like an eternity. Her sleep patterns changed and eventually she gave up on trying to track time in heartbeats and breaths, but instead listened to the sharp pangs of hunger that threaded through her, until her brain grew tired of the constant reminder and even that faded into the background. There came a time where she wondered if she was dead.

The thought quickly passed.

After all, if there was no respite from being confined to her own head in death, then the world was a far more cruel entity that she had originally thought.

It was fitting, she supposed.

Of all the things she had wished for, had envisioned, succumbing to the darkness had only ever been a metaphor, a there one second, gone the next notion that flitted across her mind only in the most desperate of times. And now, she sat in the dark and forgot to count the seconds because she was so tired, kept fading in and out of the darkness into one of a different quality. Maybe she should’ve been worried about the parched, sandpaper quality of her mouth and throat, the sharp twists in her stomach, the fuzziness of her head, but she didn’t have the energy.

There was no sense in living in an endless, windowless hell and knowing about it too. If she was going to rot here, she didn’t want to know.

She fought the images of being left there to die, to slowly waste away in a small white-walled room where she couldn’t see.

Then, she couldn’t quite decide whether it was better that she couldn’t see the walls keeping her in. If she’d been left in the light, endlessly, eternally, maybe she’d have been tempted to claw out her own eyes. The thought left her feeling sick, light-headed, but that could have just been the hunger gnawing at her stomach, the dehydration settling into her system.

What little remaining meaning time had held in her life slowly died, hollowing out until Stephanie wasn’t sure any time was passing at all. Her dreams ceased. She began to wonder if there had ever been anything beyond this endless silence, this muted darkness.