Out of My Mind

Youre just sitting there.

In a little box office, selectively adorned in extreme minimalist style with perfectly symmetrical,
solid white walls exactly one full arms length apart. As if the room was tailored just for you.
As if a clawing machine had clasped on for eternity to the sensitive tips of your fingers and
tortured and tugged, left, right, back and forth, slapping the dull outlines of your palms in
excruciatingly deafening, thunderous pounds to the bruised sides of each pale wall. But this
makes you even more content. Youve always loved those things divisible numbers, straight
edges, smoothed crinkles, evenly measured spaces that odd perfection.

Youre placed in a tiny black office chair strapped effortlessly from the ceiling. Dangling
weightlessly, your hands tighten their grasp around cold metal armrests, side to side, as if
intrusive terror had unknowingly engrained such a sudden instinct. Murmuring melodic waves of
pitiful squeaks and faint mechanic screeches crash in symphonic movement with filthy, rust-
encrusted screws propping the fragile structure together. Like an old goldfish hopelessly
swimming around, in circles and circles, youre slamming your delirious, pea-sized brain and
uncontrollably flailing tail into mockingly transparent walls, desperate for a single breakaway
moment.

Im out of my mind. You hope youll snap out of it.

But the walls of the office tower high. Infectious orange flames torch file folders in file drawers
and a million flying stacks of stringy loose papers letters to yourself, scribbled one-liners,
sticky notes of smeared ink and lead fingerprint stains. A hundred identical copies of the same
book stacked neatly in your skeptical version of the alphabetical order tumble, one by one, from
falling bookshelves. And those enclosing white walls melt like rubber and wax, dripping by the
hot drop into a blackening pile of smoldering embers and erupting volcanic ash, radiating a
punishingly putrid, fleshy foul odor. You shut your eyes hard to find comfort in the dark; youre
frozen still in a flaming room.

Hours pass like weeks, and days pass like years. You jolt and scramble and yelp in shamefully
pitchy, strained off-harmonies, echoing the faded shrieks of the shrinking black chair. Youre
utterly ballistic under incapable silence as you scrape your bony fingers down your arms and legs
only to realize that the holes you mistakenly punctured through your skin in painlessly familiar
places have been rung through with hooks, attached to ropes, and now hang from above in
deepening ceiling spaces. You shiver.

But in the sudden decrescendo of white noise and dysphoric muted chaos, the pounding silences.
The powdery, charcoal residue reconstructs into a million smooth-edged Lego pieces stacked
carefully, one aligned on top of the other, soon mending into six flat cubical walls. You sigh
heavily in exhaustion and watch the fogged cloud of moist, breathy air swirl into churning
hallucinations of a concentrated tornado rebounding against every wall, before finally
slamming in front of your petrified eyes. In fearful vision, you glance straight ahead coming
face-to-face with a giant ratted hole, an endless trail of pitch blackness. An escape!

But in the split second after, you hesitate. For no questionable reason. You double think
everything in utter oblivion to the rugged pit contrasting pure white walls with the unknown
depths of darkness retracting slowly with each passing thought. You struggle and manage to
collect all your indecisive might, and finally, ripping your arms through bloodless strains and
rattling chains, you dive in, head first.

Yet in the spur of the slightest movement, the trap shuts, cranking against gravity like a closing
sinkhole, disappearing so seamlessly as if never existing. Every force wasted on propelling your
bones and limbs and crumpled paper skin into mindless wonders of sinful detachment, shoves
you back in the ease of a simple push. Knotted strands of hair fly forth, crisscrossing from the
roots into blindfolding shields, pressed against stunned sheets of ice crystallizing the surface of
your pupils. Waves of trembling chills pulse down your spine, slamming your back up against
the rim of the tiny black office chair, locking you in, once again.

Youre just sitting there.