Prison of The Mind

It’s the voice again. Incessant and demanding. Rumbling and somehow painful, it grates on me though I haven’t felt my body in so long.

“Are you sure?” it says, “should we book you in?”

Book my death, imagine that?

I don’t know anymore. I’m not even sure there was a time before. But I think I had a body. I think I was human, I wasn’t just thoughts and emotions, like now. I also think, or vaguely remember, that I was convicted of saying something they called hate speech. I think I’m angry, or at least I was. Anyway, I seem to remember them saying that I would be imprisoned “In Toto” until I repented, or payed back something somehow. I don’t remember.

The last moment of what could be my life, was when they strapped my arms to a chair … yes a place you set your body down onto. Then they wound a strap across my neck and stuck something in my mouth. I couldn’t move my head and avoid the cold plastic tube that violated my lips. I tasted something sweet, something like candy … cold deathlike candy.

I’ve never actually had a vision since that I can definitely say was real. Everything swims and what used to be a contrast, like waking up from a dream, no longer applies. Things just boil from one image or notion into another. I don’t know how long it’s been, but I think they visit me here, wherever this place is, and I hear the voice telling me things … asking, yelling, chastising, degrading.

At first it asked why I was so angry and who I was angry with. Then it seemed that I couldn’t be angry, that I didn’t deserve to be. I was wrong and my impressions where all built on lies. I’d been deceived and they were going to bring me back to my senses. I resisted and remember vomiting and feeling sick.

There are times when things feel a little real, or what I still remember feels like real. I felt an itch once, and before I even realized what I was doing, my nails dug into the skin just below my armpit. I had the feeling that I’d been laying on my left side, and to scratch that particular spot, I’d raised my body up and reached my right hand underneath. The bed I lay in, and the room around me, complete with florescent lights and white antiseptic walls, suddenly burst into my consciousness.

I saw a plastic railing running next to the bed and a tray with medical utensils just beyond that. I placed my hand on the railing, feeling the cool ridges of where the steel sides met the plastic top. I extended my hand, reaching for what looked like a tray with a vile and a needle beside it. I had a wild thought of filling the needle and hiding it beside me and using it the next time they came back.

Well … they came back, boy did they come back! They seized my hand and twisted it. A face loomed before me and pain burst like white light in my forehead. I smelled a sweet aftershave and stale tobacco breath and then another blow … this one to my jaw. I don’t know if that was real though, it seemed like a scene from a movie not quite watched with enough interest.

The voice though, it came back and more clearly than ever before …

“Do you think that maybe it wouldn’t be better, if you didn’t ever exist?”

The first time it said this, I felt like screaming, but as time went on, and I thought about not being, it seemed like I was almost there already. Why would they ask, is what held me back from totally giving in. I was helpless as far as I could tell. I wasn’t in a real world and getting kicked out of this one seemed pretty easy for them to do to be honest. Still, it seemed like maybe there were a few rules that still existed and in some strange way I still had a small part to play in Free Will.

I challenged it one time, the voice that is.

“I want my hands back,” I said. “And my feet and eyes!” I was screaming now and I thought maybe a random movement, like the scratch, could bring me out of whatever I was in.

“But don’t you want to relax,” the voice said. It was calm and feminine, not gravely like before. “Don’t you want to just go to sleep and forget everything, like a dog?”

It had a point. The rambling emotions, the incessant voices berating and challenging me over and over were just details. I couldn’t control anything and couldn’t make sense of what or even who I was.

“You have to sign a form,” it interrupted. “Then you can just relax and we will take care of the rest. Easy peasy.”

And so I look forward to the last real moment I can experience in the real world. I hope to once more feel that I have a body, an actual human form. To feel breath as it’s drawn into my chest, and feel the rise to accommodate. To see my surroundings and to feel the texture of the sheets of the bed I now envision that I am imprisoned in.

Most of all I want to see the faces. The gravely man’s countenance, the pock marked face of Satan, the one who head butted me and threw me back into this shadow, nightmarish world. Then there’s the soft spoken woman. The one who would use her female compassion and my instincts to finish me off. I want to know them as real humans, and If I can, to communicate with them for one glorious last time.

A jump .. a lurch forward … arms raising at my sides, converging where a disembodied voice looms. The feeling of a throat! Sweet throat!