this is a quick write I did for my english class a few months ago, gothic literature 👻
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Excitement and anxiety runs through me as I watch the staff collect all the patients for bedtime. Tonight is the night I sneak out. I am tired of this place, of the same bland faces and the same tasteless food and the same brutal punishments for the same crimes. It bores me to no end. I don’t belong here, I’m not one of these people. I’m normal.
They guide us all back to our individual rooms. Rough cold hands wrap around my arm, I feel like a puppet, being thrown around. I have no idea what time it is, no idea of the date. All I know is that I have been in this place and it is never ending. It feels as if the same routine is playing out in a single day. Wake up, shower, eat, stare at the free leaves shuffling in the wind, wishing I was one of them; in my own liberty, flowing without a sense of recollection.
I think I lose my mind a little with each passing day. It feels as if months have passed, being at home seems so distant, but it has only been a few days, I am sure of it.
Tonight is it though, tonight I will get out. Once and for all, I have planned it out perfectly. Spent hours overanalyzing my plan.
After midnight, whenever that is; there are no clocks, not anywhere throughout the building. I will sneak out, through the vents into the storage room on the first floor. They said if we tried to leave, the door would ring, the alarms would ring and it’s impossible. But I didn’t believe them because they spoke with exaggeration and they spoke of brazzen things that were far from existence. Did they really think we were that stupid? I hope not. The others seemed to go with it, I just sat there and laughed. Laughed and then I was banned from the common room. I could not go back for a week. But I did not care because I was not the imbecile! The guards would most likely be dozing off if I wait long enough, I know that from countless nights of troublesome wandering. No one has dared to escape, so they do not have strict security. They do however, have cameras. But it is not revealed to us whether the camera footage was kept at recent speculation.
The nurse leaves the room, a courteous sly smile on her face as she closes the door and the light clicks of the door being locked sounds.
There is a vent behind my bed, it is screwed up, of course. But I spent my sleepless nights working on loosening it up to the point where part of it can be easily slid to the side; the tips of my fingers blistered and sore from the digging, they thought I had tried to hurt myself, they gave me pills and tablets and heavily bandaged my fingers to stop me, I felt so numb each time.
When you really think about it, there are loopholes everywhere. They can lock you up and try to hold you down all they want but there’s always a way out. This place has lots of loopholes, everyone is just blinded by the terrifying stories they tell to keep you in bed at night, to keep you from thinking about the outside world. Because when you’re in a place like this, the outside world is a nasty place. How Ironic.
I sit in bed, as awake as the morning light. I have no way of telling time because everything is monotonous. Black is always just black and white is always just white. No colors in between. The same dark glow of nighttime lasts for hours and in a heartbeat, it is daytime.
I think about what I would do, all the people I’d see, all the good food I’d eat. I think about routines and traditions and holidays. I think about christmas with my family, or halloween with my friends. Family that I would bond with and friends I would make because my lack in society is what got me in here in the first place. I am in for simply being myself.
I try to distract myself from the growing pang of anxiety. The whispers in my veins try to tell me to not do it, to not think about it. The outside world is a nasty, nasty place. But I do not listen. I say “Five Minutes more and I’ll start leaving.” and I count to sixty, I count to sixty, five times. I then, stare at the blackness of it all, the same blackness that I see when I sleep, the same blackness I see when I wake up, the same blackness I see when I look at my peers, faces in a blur, slow motion.
