No Answer

The dead walk me like a dog. Attached to me is rusty barbed wire wrapped around each one of my limbs and my neck. For each limb, one of them holds the other end of the wire, and together they walk me like a dog. They're taking me nowhere; we've been walking in an endless tunnel of darkness for a long time. It sounds like our footsteps echo a hundred times over. The darkness is so thick I can't see anything beyond us. It's disorientating, like being lost in space. I never know where my next step will take me. Will I fall into a deep hole? Will I trip into a pile of corpses? I don’t know, and I hate that I don’t. It’s so cold I can see my own breath when I exhale, and the barbed wire feels like sharp icicles stabbing me. I feel like I will drop dead anytime now from Hypothermia.

They have no face, but still, they feel so familiar, as if they’re people I know. They are punishing me, but I don't know why. It feels like personal resentment. I wonder what I did to deserve this. Why are they doing this to me? When bad things happen to me, I always tell myself it is because I deserve it so I can make sense of what I don’t understand, even if I don’t know what I did to deserve punishment. "Where are we going?" I ask, and they all turn their heads to look at me, but all I get is silence. Then simultaneously, they pull their wires, causing the barbed wire wrapped around my limbs and neck to tighten. The wire is tight enough to puncture my skin, and the fresh blood that runs down my body makes me shiver because it is cold. We keep walking in silence for a long time again, hearing nothing but the questions in my head that never end. One question continues until it drives me mad, "what did I do? What did I do? What did I do? what did I do?" I can't stop repeating it in my head.

I need an answer. Till now, I've kept quiet because I was afraid to bleed, but I can't take it anymore. I want the noise in my head to stop. It's like having bugs in my head. I can hear them buzzing, I can hear them eating in my ears, and I can feel their legs prickling over my brain as they crawl around inside my head. I need to get it out of my head, so aloud I say, "What did I do?" And the same ritual happens again, the barbed wire digs deeper into my body, but this time I continue to ask aloud, "What did I do? What did I do? What did I do?". They pull tighter and tighter, all in different directions. I'm being ripped apart, but still, I continue, and now screaming the question. It's like an itch. The more I scratch it, the worse it gets. "WHAT DID I DO?!" I scream. My body is on the brink of being torn apart.

A sharp and stinging burn overcomes my entire body, as my skin rips apart, but in my hysteria, I don't feel it. I'm too invested in the question that scratches the itch in my head. My own screams pierce my ears as they echo through the tunnel like a hundred voices mocking me. Blood spurts out my mouth from screaming out such a tight windpipe because of the barbed wire squeezing my neck.

Death is finally here. I feel it coming, and with my last breath, before I'm torn apart, I tell them…"I'm sorry," but it is too quiet; it doesn’t even echo. No one heard it but me. Those words never got to exist. My life is taken before the tears can come out of my eyes and before I can even close them. They turn away, dragging pieces of me away with them. My decapitated head lays alone, and my lifeless eyes stare into the darkness. The blood that exploded from my body rains back down onto my face. The drops of blood plop down onto my cheeks and around my eyes, then stream down my face like cold tears, but this time, I don't shiver.