Hello, Fellow Prisoners

We are at war with ourselves everyday. We stare at these walls like they will eat us alive, like they are eating us alive, gnawing at our flesh and feasting on our blood. We feel compelled to fight--how else do you get rid of that almost suffocating restlessness? Move, keep moving, keep punching the walls.

Me and some of the guys, we crept near a corner, the one with a tiny hole. We're not sure how we found the place, you never really look back and check why you are where you are unless you have time or you're bleeding or you're lost. Beyond the hole there were moving creatures, creatures made of light, creatures moving so fast so we couldn't keep up with them, creatures making sounds, sprightly, tinkling sounds, like tiny bells. They were saying, or singing, something, but not one of us understood their language.

You grow tired, sometimes, of clawing out. So sometimes you close your eyes and think of nothing. And in those tiny moments, nothing more than milliseconds, really, the walls disappear.

They do. They become like cotton candy, and then cigarette smoke, and then they disappear. Sometimes when I feel they've disappeared I'd jump from where I was standing and make a break for it, but then the wall is still there and it hurts when you've launched yourself bodily into anything.

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's what the creatures have been saying all along. So I listen to them. I become older, and edgier, and my skin is drier than the prison floor.

When you listen real hard you can figure them out. Really simple things that can rock your world. "The universe is at your side," they say. Or, "Love is the point," and such. I say this to my fellow prisoners and they look at me with pity. I began to feel alienated here. Our main business, to escape from these walls, has become a thing that became less convincing the more time I spend noticing other things.

Like the smell of unwashed hair: unbecoming and old, but human. Like tiny tongues of moss colored green and black, ugly, yes, but so bare-facedly biological you just have to have some respect for them--organisms from a million years back, still alive here in our tiny hell holes. Or my fellow prisoners' light banters suggesting hints of a friendship, a kinship, we are here together and we will keep trying to break free.

And every day, since I started noticing things, the walls start to waver. Not for everyone though, which is why I sometimes think I am making this all up. The walls waver and become pliable, a billion little vertical strings you can part somewhere and climb into and out of.

There was one day, in the middle of a specially difficult day, when I actually broke free. It was beautiful.