There is a room with no door. A child is in it. He doesn’t pace, nor does he scream. He stands perfectly still, hands lifted slightly in front of him, palms open, as if expecting to collide with something yet to exist.
The room has no dimensions, neither large, nor small. It has no corners he can count. His hands meet surfaces, but the surfaces do not organise themselves into walls.
There is no door. Not hidden. Not locked. Not just out of reach. There is simply no door.
The terror is not fear of something. It has no object. It presses on his chest and collapses time. There is no before this moment and no imaginable after. Only the certainty that this is the world, and always has been.
Later – much later – he will learn that people survive rooms like this by inventing something to hold onto. A story. A rhythm. A role. A belief. Even a monster is better than nothing.
But not yet. For now there is only the room, and the child inside it, and the overwhelming fact that nothing is coming to get him out.
Leave a Reply