I often find myself in a place where I can never tell what to listen to. This place is feverish, with pink and red surrounding me everywhere. There are solid white beams that shoot up and curve over me from what feels like hundreds of feet above. My feet squish against this pink and fat like substance which oozes this yellow-ish green clear liquid as I move.

As you would expect, my first thought is: ‘Where am I?’.

But just as you would also expect, there is no answer. There is no voice, no parent, no friend, to tell me where to go.

And so I just sit there, on some squishy pink mound, all alone. As time goes on I can start to feel the nails inside my body, the nails I use to scrape for information, scratching away at the inside of my skull. I start to see things I’ve never seen before. There is this dark, almost purplish like thread enwrapping my body like a coil. The thread goes around every limb, every joint, every facet of my body, until it consumes every last pore on my skin. White dust starts to fall like snow in the land around me, and I wonder: ‘What am I?’.

But there is still no answer. It might sound ridiculous, but I even push my earlobes out with my thumbs; maybe then someone will give me an answer.

As this white powder culminates on the floor, sticking to the pink gushy ground, I grow restless. I don’t know how long it’s been, but I feel like I haven’t slept in years. The more I look at my limbs, which are now enclosed in some hardened black rock-like substance, the more I can’t remember what I look like. I haven’t seen my face in so long. ‘Who am I?’ I think, as this white powder continues to fall.

My hearing has been heavily constrained at this point. I can’t even see, my face has been completely covered like the rest of my limbs. I scream against the wall of black clay that covers my face, looking for answers: “Where am I? What am I? Who am I?…Where am I going to go?”

Eventually, my body just falls flat. It can longer handle the weight of the slowly cementing black rock. And I lay there, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, only hearing one thing: myself.

At some point I must give up. I don’t care if I stay here for the rest of my life, but I just want to remember who I am. “How long has it been?”, I ask myself, “Since I last could remember what I looked like?”

It’s become hard to breath in my self-imposed rock mummification, and with every gust of air I let out I start to feel a spike rushing through my skin, and dragging the rock masque that surrounds my body as if it were a needle running through the strongest elastic in the world. “Am I hurting anyone?” I yell out, but of course no one answers back.

Sometimes the spikes slow down, sometimes they increase, sometimes they stop, and sometimes I still speak even though it means they’ll stab through me. At this point, I’ll beg “Where am I?” I squeeze the words out like soldiers crawling through trenches, “Who am I?” I shake like a dog clinging onto life, “What am I?!” I scream, and suddenly things start hitting the ground with a big boom. I have no idea what they are; maybe they’re rocks made out of the material this cage surrounding me is.

Nothing changes though. I am still stuck in this shell. This dark, venomous shell. I am still asking the same questions over and over; they fly around my head like birds. There is still no one to answer.

One day, I let out a weak, “Please.” Every letter feels like it’s made of paper. Cutting through my layers of skin as they ride up through my throat. I feel a hot liquid slowly trickling onto me. But I speak anyway:

“I just want someone here who I could listen to.”