The Man Within the Walls

Change. That is something that defines a person. When change comes, how do they react? Sometimes in anger, sometimes in sadness or filled with silence. In those moments, true colors come pouring out like a fresh cut artery. Take a man from his comfort zone and throw him into the desert. In those moments he will find whatever god exists for him and will extinguish it as quickly as the thought came. Survival, bestial vigor, all reason and logic are cast away. One lonely traveler is left within your soul: instinct.
  It all started out the same as everyone thinks. Thrown into a room with one door, one bed, a desk, and of course a toilet. Dull grey walls, giving it almost that concrete look, if someone hadn't decided to emphasize the loneliness by giving it a smooth surface paint of a more, dull dark grey. Stuck in between two places like the wooden house frame, sandwiched between dry wall. Daylight comes and goes, but I never see the difference anyway. It could be night when I sleep or it could be afternoon. Originally it was a goal to keep the original time set in my brain when I arrived. It was like the body knew when day was and when night was, only the mind was slowly forgetting. Eventually that thought wanders off into the fogginess of the rest of the minds original, coherent, thought processes. Food comes and goes as quickly as it came, like bone thrown to a rabid hyena. Taste doesn't even really matter anymore. The fuel it supplies is the only goal of eating. Funny thing, the aspect of human beings current "cement utopia." Restaurants on every corner, coffee shops at the next, clothing stores lined up for those materialistic savages like military men at roll call. We go from hunting for our food, hunting for our clothes and working to build and keep shelter; to having it gift wrapped and sent down a channel in a vending machine chute like Santa delivering through chimneys. Clothes hanging on metal racks waiting to be picked off like an apple being plucked from a tree. Examining each individual specimen, like a scientist searching for disease in a Petri disease. They take out their wallets, searching for that paper. That paper so desperately sought, that it can buy you survivability, if you have enough of it. Sooner or later these words will become nothing more than painters strokes with a brush. Empty, with no value to the beast living on necessity. To someone with the right emotion and the proper understanding, these strokes can make a message or a meaning in the grand portrait. But the origin of the meaning lies with the old soul of the painter. Cast overboard like a life raft, dead, destroyed, and replaced by animal sense. Death isn’t a fear that is known anymore, but the idea of never seeing out of these eyes the same, to have destiny end and future stop. What will be left for people to remember? What adjectives will follow the name thereafter? Pacing only works for so long, before you start to think each side of the room might look different, like a goldfish in a bowl. Only voice heard is the one that speaks these words or the noises from the mouth in aggravation. Moments in life become common visited places in sleeping dreams and day dreaming conquests of fantasy. Each day blends in like camouflage. Yesterdays thoughts can’t be remembered, places visited become distorted and empty. The faces of people become shades of skin color as expressions and even voice disappear. Everybody’s voice sounds like your own. Eventually people even start to carry out your mannerisms, and move in your memories as if they were a clone. Did it happen like that, or did it go like this? Was the color blue, or red? Black and white becomes any easier way to see things with all the grey and dark nights. Every idea, thought and memory become like an old film from the 50’s. But who’s to say films ever existed. There is no one else to argue the idea. The world becomes what you build, what command you give your memory to build. Sanity, like a teeter-totter on the edge of a cliff with the fat kid hanging over the edge, slips over and into an abyss. Maybe this room was nothing more than a plane of existence within the mind. Maybe tomorrow I’d be within a forest with no signs of how to get out. Time no longer means anything. Hands have frozen and stopped their tip toeing across fragments of minutes. Eventually nothing will be left, but a shell of a caged animal. The mind will move onto a new plane leaving behind nothing but a man lost in a long corridor of walls.