May 02, 2011 14:44
I can't see anything. I'm not sure if my eyes are shut or if it's just that dark. I try to blink rapidly, to figure it out and realize I can't feel my face. I don't even have the pleasure of the rapidly changing neon swirls and shapes that the mind hallucinates and projects onto the darkness. It's just black. I'm laying down and still haven't come to a conclusion on how I got that way or why every muscle in my body feels numb. No, not numb, like it doesn't belong to me, as if my brain were the only think working.
I try to take a deep breath, but I'm not sure if my chest rises and falls because I neither hear nor feel air rushing out of my nostrils. Honestly, I'm only vaguely aware of which way I'm oriented. I smell shellac and mahogany and the faint stench of something chemical that I can't identify, but gives me a nervous feeling. The blackness is pressed very close all around me. I can feel that it's a box even without being able to move, it's as if the darkness would grow hands and fingers and reach out and touch me at any moment. Not that I would feel it.
I hear mumbling from above the place I assume my head is. It's monotonous and has the cadence of a plodding horse; steady, but slow. The drone is accented by the occasional raise of inflection. I try to concentrate on the voice, but it's too hard to hear properly. After what seems like an eternity, the droning stops and everything is quiet for a moment before a new mumble takes over. It's a women, the pitch is high, but where the first voice was a horse trudging along, this new voice was a drunk man stumbling in the streets. It raises and falls, dips and breaks and it goes on for a long time. I want it to stop, the noise pains me somehow and I feel like I would cry if I could. Maybe I am.
When the woman's voice stops, everything is dead silent for a moment. The kind of harsh quiet that does its best to contain anticipatory action at any second. Then, as if the silence had been tightened to its length, it snapped and a heavy thud sounded above me followed by the most agonizing wail I'd ever heard. Considering I couldn't remember a thing outside this box, that could be saying something but the wail is almost inhuman in its pain. This was followed by heavy sobbing and several dull thuds like someone was knocking on my box.
"Why?!"
I heard that. It seemed to be all around me, that voice, so familiar and yet unplaceable. It repeated over and over again like a banshee song, Why. Why. Why. Why. Why. Each time it was asked, the question seemed more intense, more earnest. I don't know why. I try to open my mouth to speak, to comfort this unseen stranger, to say anything just to make the pleading stop but the woman wails loudly as the pounding stops and her voice grows weaker as she moves away from me.
I lay there for I don't know how long, listening to the murmurs above me. None of them have been as achingly saddening as the woman, but they all speak like a baby learning to walk; teetering and toddering this way and that with their voices, quivering, falling down and righting themselves up again. I spend the time trying to remember how to work my body, but it's like operating dead machinery. The pieces are there, the operator is there, but the machine isn't responding. I'm startled by a lifting sensation and feel the box being lowered somewhere as a chorus of the murmurs intone something together, like a chant or a prayer.
I feel the box stop moving and the metallic sound of a hoe or a shovel hitting dirt followed by a light rain of thudding on my box. This continues for a few minutes and then ceases entirely. The murmurs gone and left to my own devices, I found I had the sensation of traveling up and down the box, though my body didn't budge an inch. Not that I would be able to see it. I feel tired, but that this isn't the place to rest, my mind goes back to the wailing woman and her endless question. I still didn't know why.
I was interrupted by a beeping noise and without further warning something huge fell on top of my box with a bwomf. My sense of smell, the only one I seemed to have retained besides hearing, was overwhelmed with the scent of wet dirt, my box bowed a little under the pressure. I could tell because the darkness closed in on me from the top. With every load of dirt, the sounds got further and further away until there was nothing but a cold, wet kind of quiet. What else could I do but stay there?
I think I'm hallucinating now, I've been quiet in my head for what seems like hours, trying not to drift off to sleep, unable to shake the feeling that this was not the place to rest. A pinprick of light appeared far above me, far above the confines of the blackness surrounding me, like I was looking at a space outside my box. The light grew in size and intensity so quickly that it frightened me, but I found myself being pulled towards it. Did I want to go? Its grasp on me was light and I could break free, back to my box, but something in the light spoke of comfort, of rest. And really, all I wanted in that moment was to rest in peace.