A prison

A desert wasteland has become my home. I can’t leave. I’d just die from the elements in a day or two, if I didn’t get picked off by the locals first. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I’ve always been a good person, or so I thought. I smiled, and held the doors for old ladies. I did my homework, even if I didn’t always get the best grades. I got a job, and did well. But now I’m in prison.

I wake up in my cell. Another day. Another day that’s going to be exactly the same as yesterday. It’s a repetitious cycle that never changes. Go work out first. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up the motivation to exercise, but then I see the faces around me. Eyes filled with lunacy or hatred stare at me. Even worse are the eyes that are empty. I don’t belong here. I don’t fit in. I’m not like them. Yet I’m here just the same, and I have to protect myself. So I exercise to keep my strength up. I never know when an attack might come, so I must always be ready.

Leaving the gym exhausted, I go to work. Sometimes I wish they would make me do real work. Send me out to dig ditches or clean the bathrooms…. Anything to get me out of this cage. For 12 hours straight I am forced to stare at computer screens, making sure some mysterious process keeps working the way it’s supposed to. I don’t even know what I’m looking at. I just stare at the monitors and tell the guard if I notice a change. If I do what I’m supposed to do, I get rewarded with a cold bowl of slop to eat. If I make a mistake I get nothing.

Work is finished and I feel like my eyeballs are bleeding. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I trudge across the scorched earth back to my cell. My brain is fried and I need to sleep. When I get to my cell I collapse onto my rigid cot that squeaks like crazy and I can feel the madness beating on the door to my mind. It’s getting more and more difficult to keep it out. I don’t know how much longer I can continue before I lose my grip on my sanity or just give up entirely.

There is one thing though that seems to keep me from falling into the abyss. A dream. It floats above my bed and seems to whisper to me as I drift to sleep. It’s the one thing of beauty in this hell of a life. As I drift off to sleep each night the dream speaks to me, and I seem to enter another world and there I speak with an angel. She is so beautiful and I think she is watching over me. I hope I’m not hallucinating. I hope she is real. If she isn’t, I’m a goner….