ICON | [ tenya iida ]

[ i ]

YOU LIVED
in shadows.

The silhouette of your family overwhelmed your very being, enveloping your soul, small and fragile and growing, with tenebrous tendrils and claws of crepuscular creatures, relentlessly ripping you from the sunlight that seemed always just a single step away, sitting as hollow as your flummoxed heart.  Light was something that eluded you.  You could feel it, the warmth, the incandescence, the unadulterated holiness glistening gold against your skin, but it was doomed to esoteric evanescence.  It had been months since you had been outside.

It had been months since you had left the basement.

That was rather standard, of course.  You lived there, by yourself, only allowed to enter the rest of the house at night, once all was encased in darkness, to ensure no outsiders, no peepers or paparazzi or even commonplace pedestrians passing by could possibly catch a clear glimpse of you.  Rarely were you bored, though.  Over the years, things had accumulated.  Bookshelves lined the walls in orderly fashion, stacked to the brim with guides, novels, novellas, biographies, fiction, fantasy, and informational tomes.  There was the old chessboard, rotting with age but functional nevertheless.  Cards and board games, notebooks and radios, an old iPod and ancient corded dial phone.  There was even an old television, and a debilitated PC that looked as though it was straight out of the early nineties (no wifi, of course - this was the basement, and the behemoth monitor required a direct plug into a router regardless, which of course you did not have) and a cellphone, albeit limited in use due to almost no internet connection whatsoever.

There was space, at least.  Not much, but enough to constitute two rooms.  To the left was the learning area, where schoolwork sat in dangerously teetering piles upon piles of completed work and packets and quizzes and test, some long-done, others just barely begun, notebooks filled to the brim with your quick but clear shorthanded jots of information you'd plucked from textbooks and lessons presented by your parents or siblings.  Most of the time, however, you would simply pour over a book, absorb the information, and formulate a concise method of teaching yourself, through trial and error, success and failure, predictions and practice.  This of course was all to be done on your own time, during the day, so that when nighttime came you would have something to show for yourself to prove your worth to those who lived and reigned above.

The rest of the world was a mystery to you.  You did not know what lay beyond the confines of the four walls of your incommodious penitentiary, with fibers of pink insulation dancing in the artificial light of your pathetic but precious oil lantern, dirty metal brown in your soft hands, and floors of stone cold as ice.

But oh, how you missed the sun.

Sometimes, when you finished your lessons early, or else stayed up very late, you could hear voices drifting up from the hallway below you.  You would gently press your ear to the wooden planks constituting the basement floor and close your eyes, attempting to decipher the people behind the voices.  Occasionally you couldn't pin it, or else it was unfamiliar, but mostly it was a man and someone else, be it your mother, your sister, or your brothers.  Although you knew you shouldn't eavesdrop, you couldn't help it.  Even though you knew.