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Hold the Walls

it's the only way you can escape

By Sam Eliza GreenPublished 2 years ago 11 min read
1

Open your eyes. Emptiness engulfs you. A continuous plane of pale marble stretches into the distance—the flat horizon an unwanted promise of eternity. Everything else is sky, reflecting light from a nameless sun. You feel betrayed by the silence. Scream in fear. Your voice is stolen by greedy air. In the absence of echo, you fall to the stone floor, anchored by the truth of this void. There is nothing else out there.

Cry. Loneliness is the only thing accompanying you. Memories of your life are washed away. Was there a before? Thoughts of a faceless other stains your body with inexplicable pain and longing. The absence haunts you. Were you always alone? Try to hold onto the vague idea that there are people out there. Wonder if they know your name. Crawl into the arms of helplessness. Convince yourself this can only be a nightmare. Close your eyes. Go to sleep. When you wake, you’ll know the truth.

Beneath the cloudless sky, you stir from a nightmare—lightheaded, lungs aching, body rigid like your bed of stone. Chisel yourself from the pale marble. Stand like you have a purpose. Look into the endless horizon, and run. It is the only way to answer your hopeless terror. Scream until you lose your voice. Wait for the echoes that will never come. Question your sanity when panic seizes your thoughts. Where are you and why?

You should catch your breath, but you keep running, desperate to escape the emptiness. Look for facts in the face of uncertainties. The floor is hard. The sky is bright. You’re alive and filled with dread. Hold onto the vague idea that you’re running toward someone. Distance means nothing here. You try to count the seconds but lose track after one thousand. You should take a break, relax, close your eyes and convince yourself this is another nightmare.

Your nose cracks against a wall. Your fatigued body crumbles from the impact. Lie on the floor as your face bleeds. Try to fix it with the collar of your shirt. Your eyes pulse from the searing pain. Cry in relief. There is more than emptiness out there. Sit up as crimson streaks your pale clothes. The wetness clings to your skin. Confusion steals your moment of hope as you look at the empty horizon.

Stand with caution. Reach toward the invisible barrier. Clench your jaw as your hand falls through the air undeterred. Question your sanity again. Blood marks your clothes as proof of the impact. There is something out there, an invisible something that could guide you away from emptiness. You just have to find it again.

Okay, the wall has moved. You’ll stumble across it eventually. Walk with your arms outstretched—one in front, one to the side. Kick your legs higher when your arms get tired. Hope your foot will catch it before your face. Think only about the wall, the impact that left your nose broken and sore. Where did it go? Are there more than one? You walk for what could be hours or days. Time seems pointless now.

A mask of blisters covers the bottom of your bare feet. Each bitter step brings you closer to defeat. Give into the pain as your knees fall. Collapse against the familiar feel of the endless marble. The wall has abandoned you like everything else. Try to stand again. Sob in a pathetic murmur as your body refuses its own weight. Hunger and exhaustion eat your abdomen. Decide your are a part of a cruel game.

Ruin has taken you. Wonder if there’s anything left to recover. Press your cheek against the floor. Shield your eyes from the cloudless sky. Simmer in loneliness. It’s more painful than shattered bones. Try to remember your life before. Do you deserve this?

Thoughts of the faceless other resurface. You don’t know who they are, but you remember how they made you feel—proud, surprised, content, sometimes frustrated and annoyed, but never alone. Hold onto those feelings as your body bleeds and belly shrinks. You are too weary to move on. Close your eyes. Go to sleep. Hope it’s not for the last time.

Covered in sweat and dry blood, you wake into the nightmare. Abandon ideas of the wall. Convince yourself there is something else waiting for you on the horizon. Remember the feelings. Count them on your fingers. Wrap halves of your shirt around your raw feet. Walk like a foal as you struggle for balance.

Think of the wild horses. Hungry wolves hunted sick deer. Remember the emaciated bear with its nose pressed against the ice. Wonder if they know your name. Trudge forward like you’re on the tundra. Search the horizon for trees. You used to burn the fallen branches to stay warm. Heat is no longer a concern.

Hold your arms around your chest, falling into the embrace of an imaginary friend. When you realize they don’t exist, you let go, terrified by your teetering sanity. Watch them disappear into the horizon. Chase them because you don’t want to be alone.

Your forehead splits against the wall. Press the gash together as you slide across the floor. Bleed on the pale marble. Scramble forward and try to catch the elusive barrier. Your pained body falls through the air like a kite on a calm day. Remember dream catchers hanging in the trees. You wish someone was here to catch you.

Your imaginary friend waits on the horizon. She is no longer a faceless other—some figment of your unstable mind. She’s tall with charcoal hair cloaking her face. Her eyes peer at you from the shadows. You can see her smile, plastered like she has never known sadness. She is the memories you refused to let go, the source of the feelings that made you feel whole. You don’t remember her name. You don’t need to.

“Come back!”

Calling after her is the only way you can hold onto these vague thoughts. Remember the dream catchers adorned with feathers and bones. Remember the footprints in the snow. Follow them as you run toward her. Her hair grows miles long, the ends just out of reach. Lunge forward and seize a brittle strand. Remember the mutated fish in the murky rivers. Reel her in like the impatient angler on the bank.

She waves at you like a sheet on a clothesline, her body dissolving in the invisible wind. The dark hair sinks onto the depths of the marble. You mourn in her absence, so harshly aware you didn’t want her to go. Scream and wait for the echoes. Your broken voice sounds pitiful before unanswered silence. Wrap the locks around your body, a blanket from your companion too soon gone. Tell yourself you’ll see her again. Promise it’s not a lie.

You want anything but stillness. You want to keep walking, brave the void until you find her again. But a weary mind numbs you, the pounding headache piercing your thoughts. Shield your eyes with the blanket of hair. When you fall asleep, wrapped in the scent of a now familiar other, don’t let the loneliness haunt you.

You wake, convinced this is no longer a nightmare but your cruel reality. The quilt of hair is gone. You search for it pitifully like a toddler would a lost teddy. Try to ignore the splitting migraine as you sit on the invariable marble and cry. The longer you wait, the more it feels like you belong here as a forgotten nothing.

Search the barren horizon for the woman. You hear faint wisps of her voice like an echo that finally returned from a journey to the moon. Remember the footsteps in the snow. The image is almost as clear as the cloudless sky. The shallow craters bled together as you walked. You weren’t sure which were hers or yours as the wind ate your foggy eyes.

“Come back!”

She has stolen your words. Her baldness hides beneath a scarlet shawl as she yells from the distant horizon. Try not to think of the miles of used-to-be ebony hair. When she waves at you, her body a permanent fixation, sigh. Don’t let her piercing stare frighten you. It’s just panic in her eyes.

Remember her fear. She used to hold you while her body shattered secretly, your embrace the only comfort for her untreated pains. Remember the nights she begged you to take them away. There was nothing you could do, but you tried. Stand because you have a purpose. You have to reach her before she disappears. Run and hope she knows the way home.

When your body hits the wall, lungs robbed of air, keep running. Don’t let the confusion of the wall’s hidden nature slow you. You bleed again from the next impact, scarlet pouring over your eyes as she fades into the distance. Push forward with weary legs and beg her to stay longer.

Countless times you fall, holding the walls with your battered body for only seconds before they disappear. Look for her each time you stand. Hold onto the strands of memories like a lifeline. Let them pull you in.

Remember the night she stood with you beneath the aurora, the dream catchers dancing in the hungry wind. Follow the bloody footprints. She cried that night when she ran away, trying to hide the proof of her blighted lungs, but she wore the stains like lipstick melting off her face.

She stands on the horizon with a look of helpless terror as she waits. You keep running toward her, but the longer you take the more she fades away. Hit the wall, recover in instinct, crash into another, stumble into the next. She cries at your downfall, her voice a breathy reminder that you’re not alone. Crawl forward, collapse against the floor as the next wall impedes your weary bones. Smash your fist against the pale marble and bleed. Desperate tears swim in the crimson lake.

The bloody footprints led you to a point of no return. Remember how the ice-crusted hinges cracked, the cabin door weighted by stubborn wind. She cried at her own downfall, a mess of stained towels and ruined clothes piled around her like a nest on the bathroom floor. When you found her, tried to understand your cruel reality, she hid her face in shedding chunks of tangled hair. She begged you to take away her pains. You didn’t realize how heavy they were.

“Don’t leave!” you beg as you stare at her from your resigned position on the gory marble floor.

Remember the night in the bathroom when she bled buckets that would paint abstract symbols in the snow. Your embrace was the only thing to comfort her tragic pains. When you recover from the relentless encounters with the walls, try not to look at her face. Just remember the dream catchers in the trees as you trudge across the last eerie feet between nothingness and her. Convince yourself the walls have finally given in.

She stares at you with dreadful emptiness in her eyes. Reach to touch her stark face. Red fingerprints streak the glass between you. Press your palm against the wall. It doesn’t disappear like the others. When you look at her from the other side, her painless smile haunts you.

Greedy silence has stolen her voice. She used to write songs with balding birds, collecting their fallen feathers. They left long before that desperate day, but she tried to sing their song that night while you held onto the last fighting pieces of her. Eventually, she couldn’t cry anymore. She just stared at you with those endlessly suffering eyes.

Stand in front of the infinite wall and wait for her to hold your hand. She never will. When she touches the glass, tracing the outline of your palm, her face fades. The hungry wolves clawed at the frozen door before she was gone—hasty reapers of the desolate tundra. You covered her ears, and she begged you to take away the pain. It was the only way she could escape her living nightmare. When you held her, panic seized her face—the late remnants of her will to survive. Try to forget those empty eyes.

When she’s gone, stare through the dark glass. A vacant hall taunts you on the other side. Spin on aching feet. Count the corners in confusion. Inventory the broken void—four walls, a floor of cushioned pillows, and a fluorescent ceiling light.

Throw your body against the glass and hope you’re heavy enough to break it. Your bones shatter instead. Fall prey to delirium as your head spins. Gaze dreadfully at the center of the empty room. It would be so easy to lose yourself to the void.

Listen to the echoes of your pathetic cries. Realize this is your life. Wonder if there is anything left to recover. Try to grapple with the unearthed memories. When you start to forget, when the reminders of her empty eyes drift away, hold the walls. It’s the only way you can escape.

Short Story
1

About the Creator

Sam Eliza Green

Wayward soul, who finds belonging in the eerie and bittersweet. Poetry, short stories, and epics. Stay a while if you're struggling to feel understood. There's a place for you here.

Reader insights

Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

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  1. Compelling and original writing

    Creative use of language & vocab

  2. Heartfelt and relatable

    The story invoked strong personal emotions

  3. Excellent storytelling

    Original narrative & well developed characters

  1. Masterful proofreading

    Zero grammar & spelling mistakes

  2. On-point and relevant

    Writing reflected the title & theme

  3. Eye opening

    Niche topic & fresh perspectives

  4. Easy to read and follow

    Well-structured & engaging content

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Comments (1)

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  • Coral Perry2 years ago

    Amazing, heart-wrenching story! The use of third person storytelling and the great symbolism is amazing!

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