You learn things about yourself. How deep the hole behind the mind goes and what it leads to. How strong you can make yourself, the capabilities of muscle even with horrific excuses for food. You learn what can pass for food. What your stomach can handle is more important than what your tongue can. You remember the sun but not what it looks like. What it feels like goes first, and then what it looks like. It’s a circle, but is it red or orange or yellow? Does that change? It comes up and it goes down, but it has been so long.
I used to try to kill myself out of guilt by running from one end to the other and bashing my head against the wall of stone. After I woke up the second time I decided it wasn’t worth it. I forgot what I even did. The face. The feeling. Gone with the darkness, collected by the droplets sinking from the dirt above and off the stone and bloodstain and across the concrete floor down the puny drain. Goodbye.
All then you think of is food. They will put it through the slot once a day and you have to be ready for that sliver of light from the slot so you can see what it is or the taste will be a mystery. That confused me, waiting for the taste, because I knew I would eat it anyway. I almost never missed it anymore. I could see what was given and it was usually smashed peas or a collection of mushrooms, wheat and water. No spoon. Hands. Taste of dirt and salt from your own fingers, mush. Licked clean the dish and tossed across the room to hear the sound. Hit with the hands in rhythm and time but I forgot what rhythm was. Who knows what that sounded like. They had one man outside the door to stand guard at all hours, switching shifts I believe because it would be impossible to have the same lone man, but I like to imagine I drove them crazy with my music. Maybe they would get together and discuss how the freak in the cage had been that week, how horrific his sounds and his stench are.
I piss in the drain and shit in the corner. I sometimes get it down the drain when they give the bucket of water to bathe myself once a week. I build figures in the dirt but I cannot see what they look like so I feel for shapes and curves and bumps and configure them with my fingers the best I can until I can register them as people-like and I can talk to them. What do I say. I get nervous. I ask them how the weather is, as the silt they are made of connects through the Earth up through the soil to the ground. I ask them what weather feels like. I ask them what people say and how it feels for ants and bugs to dig through them, to make holes and homes in their dirt. They never say anything.
I swing the bucket around when it’s empty so many times with each arm. I feel my arms after each day and I think they get bigger. I push myself off the ground and do it until my abdomen crinkles and pains. How good pain feels when it’s your only sensation. How badly I miss the sun, coughing mucus onto the floor all the time. I am a ghost.
I don’t know if I had friends. I must have had family. Don’t know where they are. Don’t know where I am. I remember my mother’s face clearly. It is the thing I remember the best. Mother I’m sorry.
It has been twenty years I suppose. They open the door. Two fat men each with a club. They tie my hands together and I show them that I can slip out. I am not beat. They tie it tighter and tighter.
Fire in a lantern on the wall. More light than I’ve ever seen. I lift my knees to walk up the stairs and vomit halfway up. One of them hits me in the spine, I howl. I am led even further up and they lift the door.
What I see next is everything so it blinds me. I scream with the unknown sensation, blind, white, everything and everything that is out here. I crumple to the ground and on it I feel an earthly sensation, the Earth and the grass, dirt and bugs. I weep for them and they for me. Colors. Blue. The sun is yellow, I remember now. Where is my mother? I’m crying and smiling my tears into the rough and sharp grass.
They pull me up and break a bone. “Where am I?” I say
“What?”
I say it again. They scoff. “Go.” With my hand holding the other arm I run. I run until there is no more to see. There are people all over to which I cannot speak, buildings I dare not enter.
The river welcomes me. I jump in. Years of grime gone downstream. I am a man. I remember now.