She hasn’t left her room for three days. She hasn’t left her house in two weeks. She hasn’t gone into town in a month before that. She hadn’t been rationing her food supply on purpose but it’s what ended up happening anyway.
She’s laying on the floor, now. She’s been laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling for hours. She knows that the ceiling is a muted, toneless, comforting beige but all she can focus on is the creeping gray shadows that feel like a physical barrier between herself and the rest of the world. She knows that these shadows are only really in her head, but four nights ago the angle of the sun coming through her curtains had been just right and all she could focus on was an oppressive mass of shadow that froze her in her tracks and locked her inside her own mind as it crawled nearer and nearer.
That horrifying moment had only been that, a moment, but now that she’s locked away she doesn’t even have the energy to start looking for the key.
She’s been lying on the floor staring at her not-gray ceiling for hours. She has no idea what day it is because every time her mind starts to right itself into something resembling coherency there is another shudder of uncertainty and the physical shadows in her mind slither over her more tightly and she is left again a shell of herself, dead, glassy eyes staring, seeing nothing and the ceiling, both at once.
However, if there is one thing she can focus on longer than anything else, it is the shadows. The ones that wriggle in the corners of her periphery and make up her cage. Even if her mind can’t pull itself together enough to name the days, she can at least count how many times the shadows were at their weakest and instead of reaching towards the silhouette of her body, she can at least count the three times where she felt the light pressure of warmth on her skin. It lasted a little while, she remembers, vaguely, but it was never long before the briefest change in the shadows illuminated their own movement again. Again, if coherency was anywhere near possible she might question how her strict one-way mind can connect that this means that days have passed, but for now she just waits in numb agony for nothing and everything in her mind to make sense.
She has no idea if she is awake or asleep and really, doesn’t care.
now I know this is a place for poems and this is prose but...... this has been niggling at the back of my mind when I try to sleep. lately, I've been having that thing happen where I sleep so much but I still wake up exhausted. I hope for rest for myself and I hope that someone else can relate to this.
I've been super obsessed with superhero movies and the combination of this and seeing the trailer for Neil Gaiman's masterclass I feel like I almost have a solid idea for an actual plot of a story based off this. I'll probably think about for months before anything happens but. I guess this is a test run.