I was beginning to slip into insanity. I felt everything in me going crazy. I wanted to escape, I wanted to be free from this nightmare. I wanted to be away from the humans. What didn’t I want at that point? What didn’t I when all around me distorted into a cage? A prison, a place of suffering, of sheer, unbearable agony?
Yes, I know what I wanted most at the time. Freedom. I wanted to be free. To escape that nightmare, that anguish… I wanted to rid myself of my fears… Of my feelings…
Yes, of the feelings I so much longed to understand. The emotions I was so desperate to experience. They were nothing more than insufferable agony. They built up in my head like bars of a cage. I was well aware of it. I knew I was my own mind’s prisoner. I was a little bird with its wings clipped to the floor of its cage… I wanted to fly high, I wanted to flee, to flee as far away from my own self. To be nothing more but a senseless entity wandering in the vastness of space, with no understanding whatsoever of these harmful ideas.
But what could I do? Even my body was imprisoned. All that made up what others defined as ‘me’ was locked up in this tiny, white room. Entrapped between these thick walls, always ready to suffer at the hands of the coated human beings.
They became more and more insufferable as days went by. None understood me. None wanted to even listen. No… They didn’t. What else could I have expected from these creatures? These mindless creatures with no sense of awareness… Yes, indeed. The best way to keep one from escaping is to never let him know he’s imprisoned. But then, was it possible that all these humans were living inside their own cages, none a bit aware of it? Was it possible that no human being was even able to escape?
It tormented me, as far as I was concerned. I myself was unable to dispose of them anymore, once I became fully aware of them. I could still feel the horror awakening in me as I kept thinking that there was no possible way I could do anything except obliviate myself. But no, no! I wanted to get rid of them completely. I couldn’t live with the thought of once having wished to understand them, of actually having understood these concepts… Of having become aware I’ve always had them buried deeply within me… My soul, my mind… Perhaps… They made these mindless creatures treat me like one of their own. Perhaps… I was supposed to be one of their own by the nature of my emotional consciousness… Yes, I was supposed to be. I never said I was. I couldn’t be. Of all ideas I had on what I truly was, none resembled a human being. So maybe there weren’t just the feelings and emotions defining these mindless organisms. There had to be more than that. Something that wasn’t at all horrifying. Something that was truly… human.
I didn’t know anything about what they were, what made them what they were. But I wasn’t in the slightest ready to find out. I wasn’t ready for what was to come.
One day came when I completely lost control. I didn’t want to have to deal with anything anymore. I was desperate to be free; so desperate that I shed blood. And that felt good… So good that I couldn’t stop myself. Red was such a beautiful color, flowing like a spring on the white floor, almost in a spiral pattern. Yes, my eyes followed it like it was a guide into another world, like it was trailing my path out of there…
But no, it wasn’t… It was circling around me… It began to spiral over the walls, all around the room… Red, red, red, everything was red, red, red! I was far from insane, I was. I was so drawn to it I began to laugh uncontrollably. It was so much like an inaudible scream… Yes. I remember screaming. Screaming and clawing the walls like a feral animal, screaming at the top of my lungs. I could hardly call that insanity. But not desperation either. No… It was no feeling…
My own mind couldn’t explain what it was doing, what it was making me do… It was just so lost, sunken so deeply into that image of red that it could no longer find its way out… Red, red, red, everywhere… Why? Why was it doing that to me? Why…?
I couldn’t even stay awake anymore. I was dizzy, I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t even wish to wake up to that horrifying reality once I closed my eyes. I never wanted to open them again. Not to this world as it was. Not into that room, now stained with blood… Not to the still body of that human being, to the memories of what I myself have done… No… I didn’t want that… I didn’t want to feel, yet I was, I was overwhelmed by guilt like I had just done something I shouldn’t…
From then, I don’t remember what happened. All I had before my eyes was a void. A dark, empty void where only my own voice was resounding from all corners. Sometimes like a mechanical whisper, sometimes like demonic screeching… I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t see through the chaos in my mind… Yes, yes, all in my head, in this subconscious… It felt so much like a dream, like a lucid dream…
But then… my eyes opened. They did… I could see… I could, and I was no longer in there, in the white cell. Was I laying flat on my back? I must have been, I could see neon lights above me, on the ceiling. They were so pale… No wonder it was so dark in there. And yet, I could see…
I could distinguish a figure beside me… The figure of a human being… His hair was disheveled, an unkept mix of dark strands with streaks of white. It was slicked back, but with stray locks that fell into his face, giving him a slightly unhinged look. His skin was pale, so pale that even in the darkness it appeared light grey. His expression was serene, but almost blank, his neon blue eyes were fixated on me like I was some sort of rare treasure. He had a pair of cracked, round glasses that gave him a more sinister look.
And I was not mistaken, he was one of the white-coated creatures. His lab coat had smudges of blood and its pockets were stuffed with pens and some strange devices.
He was sitting not to far from me, not taking his eyes off. Unlike the others, he was oddly silent. He asked no question even when he noticed I woke up.
Minutes passed and he didn’t move from there. He was motionless, like a statue. I remained still, somehow admiring him. He was so different. So strange, but strange in a good way… Like he wasn’t at all human.
I stared into his eyes for a while; he never flinched. He wasn’t reacting in any way to anything.
But after a while, the silence became dreadful. I couldn’t sit still anymore, I couldn’t stare anymore into the abyss of his soul… No, it was so much like my own. Hiding something behind the dark curtain, something he didn’t want to show. I could hear the voices in my head whispering, telling me to unravel what lay hidden. But no. No, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to torment myself with anything new… With anything I would choose to get rid of in the end.
But I felt the same desire from him as well. What was it that made me able to see? Why did I see it?
His low voice suddenly broke the silence.
“I see… So, you deny your human nature. You walk a different path; your mind is entirely different than that of a human being. You are rather two entities in one body. They are conflicted, very conflicted. The human in you is craving this ‘new’, while the other side is trapping it, silencing it… Stealing away every bit of curiosity.”
I didn’t listen too attentively to his words. I couldn’t focus when my mind was in such chaotic state. But that one word he spoke…
Curiosity…
“It so appears to me that you focus specifically on whatever gets your attention. I assume you do wonder how I’m able to read you like you’re a clearly, beautifully written poem… Yes, that is what you are… The letters are strokes of blood imbedded into the paper, revealing words of desperation and pure anguish. Yes, that’s what you are. The embodiment of an inhuman mind, of an entity of pain. You fascinate me.”
I didn’t speak. I let him do the talking, I listened, attentively this time. No, no, this creature was not speaking lies. His eyes could truly reach deeply into my core. He could see. Yes, he could see my vague ideas, he understood them like even I myself didn’t. He was no ordinary human. He had to be a being above them…
Although I was trying to make some sense of what’s been happening in the past minutes, even after a new moment of dead silence, that one question began to resound in my ear again. What was curiosity? He referred to the human side of me. Yes, indeed, that was just what he said. He said I have a human side I am trying to silence… What could that mean? What was it that he saw and I didn’t?
A grin formed at the corners of his pale, rather crusty lips as he suddenly stood up from the wooden chair he had been sitting on that whole time. He approached me slowly, with faint steps and sat himself beside me. Naturally, a human would have felt scared. Yes, scared because they were in an unknown place with this inhuman creature reading the deepest, darkest secrets of their souls.
But I didn’t even flinch. I didn’t know what to expect, but whether or not something would happen, I would not be the least moved.
He slowly rose a hand and touched my face gently. His hands were bare, not gloved like others’. And his touch was cold. So much colder than a human’s. He stared into my eyes in a strange way. I couldn’t feel… Yes… Yes, I lost my ability to feel at that time. All of it was gone…
“Tell me. Have you ever felt drawn to something? Have you ever felt the need to experience something new, something that wasn’t known to you before?” he asked.
I simply nodded. I was never confident about speaking. As a matter of fact, there was no time I have spoken. No, I don’t remember uttering a word. I simply understood the humans because they’d always spoken with me…
I saw the grin disappear from his face. “Can’t you talk? Or you just don’t want to?”
I expected that question, of course. Humans always got so impatient and even angry at me when they heard nothing come out of my mouth. But he didn’t look mad. Perhaps just a little disappointed. He didn’t throw any spiteful look at me, just quietly ran his eyes over my entire figure.
I didn’t give him a response. I didn’t know how I was supposed to answer.
“I’ll assume you don’t want to talk. I understand. Everyone needs time. But in the meantime, will you allow me to talk to you?”
I nodded in agreement. Now I longed for something once again. That something was an answer. An answer from him. To all he had said to me, to all he had tried to explain even when I wasn’t paying attention. I knew there was something in there that only he could help me unravel.
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