Trap

When you’re staring, there’s no time to look within or around, to question the limits to which we’re bound. 

I’m locked in a room under a screen’s burning glow, ropes knotted around my ankles and wrists, embedded into a chair. My eyelids peeled back in a trap, neck jutted back, consuming all day until I’m braindead by night. 

One man’s torture is another man’s cycle. A pain numbed into motion, sticking like rot until I’m nothing but primal. The claw’s are clamped around my sockets, clip after clip after clip, rubbed in like lotion with a finger flick. No break for a light switch. No chance for the mind to slip. Just noise to suffocate and paralyse in an eternal head grip. 

Years have passed since this contraption was latched to my skull. Jigsaw’s blow. It’s an easy game to play, one rooted in mass pedestrian sway. I’ll just watch until death takes the static away. All the big questions – why am I here, when did I write this note – kept far at bay. 

There’s nothing keeping me here. I can wrestle off these restraints if I had drive to spare. In the periphery, there’s no chainsaw ready to lacerate my spine, or a mechanism twisting my body into disrepair. Uncertainty is my greatest fear, so maybe distraction is the only way out of this. A steady nightmare between extremes, keeping us together at the seams. 

In this life, everything rhymes. A slipstream with easy dots. No time to pause, hesitate, pull on the handbrake. Why would I snap out of this? Just look at the seasons I’ve conquered over the summer break. At the end of the day, this life is mine. I’ll resume my freedom after episode nine.