Blinded Lights

Time was at a standstill. Ziya’s eyes widened slowly and unwillingly, powered by nothing other than habit. The three rods of fluorescent lighting on the ceiling scorched her corneas and fogged her mind. This pain is momentary, she thought to herself. Ziya knew the feeling of real, long-lasting pain. Most days she could still feel it in her skin. She had grown used to the endless loop of rude awakenings, as They would never turn off the lights in her room. She had a suspicion that the constant brightness meant that They were always watching.

Ziya rose and arched her back as she prepared herself to begin a new day, but without clocks or windows around who was she to tell what time of day it was. Her cotton gown appeared to be getting thinner by the minute. With the hems unhemmed and the edges frayed, her attire seemed to be merely a formality as if to comply with the minimum shred of dignity a human was ostensibly entitled to. She could feel the cold slab of stone she was made to sleep in seeping into her thighs. The chill surrounded her entire body, reaching up to the inner core of her bones. She could barely feel herself these days. Her frosty fingertips softly grazed her face and eyes, but the feeling was more harsh than soothing. The numbness was constant at this point and had begun to feel more than physical. Maybe moving around would help, she thought.

She stood up and stretched her slim frame. Her stomach growled and rumbled. She could not remember the last time she had been fed. Remembering things had been getting progressively more difficult since she was taken from her home that night. Ziya had suspected something like this could happen, but she was doing what she thought was right. Her work meant a great deal to her.

Slowly and quietly pacing the room, she began to notice the small details that plainly adorned her quarters. The matte, metal door had no handle since it could only be opened from the outside. She vaguely remembered the instances in which They opened the door to fetch her. Her stomach roared once again, this time a little more painfully than the last.

She traced the wall next to the door with her pointer finger until she reached the opposite corner of the room, where she saw the narrow, mounted slab of stone They had provided her as a table. A worn-out piece of bright red chalk sat on top of it. Just next to the table and only slightly below, an equally narrow slice of steel served as her chair. She imagined herself sitting at her desk at home and how cozy that used to make her feel. She wrote some of her best pieces on that desk.

Only a few feet to the right, a pit latrine and a small brass spigot stared back at her in disgust, further reducing her to a version of herself she could no longer recognize. Ziya abruptly shifted her gaze to save herself from another one of the suffocating downward spirals she had grown so used to since that harrowing night.

“235”, she softly mumbled to herself. That’s how long it had been. At least that’s how long she thought it had been. Two hundred and thirty-five times in which she paced around the room for so long she was too exhausted to care about the glaring lights above her and just dozed off… The cycle continued.

Ziya had been keeping track of these loops on the wall. She couldn’t let herself forget. Just below the table, in the very corner formed by the wall, she had sketched 47 squares with a line across them. Each of them signified five days since her entrapment. A day per line. Just as her mother had taught her when she was a child.

She carefully dropped her weakened body to the floor and inched closer towards the table. Ziya checked her surroundings trying desperately to avoid the look of potentially prying eyes. She felt her heart hastily pumping blood throughout her body. After making sure that she was safe from any suspecting gaze, she crouched below the table and tried her best to focus her now sore eyes on that nook that had become her only constant throughout her stay in this enclosure. Upon closer inspection, she noticed it was blank.

She didn’t understand. She remembered the bright red lines she had drawn oh-so-carefully every single day of her stay. It was her ritual. It was her sanity. Had someone entered the room during the night and erased them? Were They trying to mess with her mind?

“They must have seen it!”, she thought. She frantically crawled back to the middle of the room. Ziya stood up and took a look around. The door, the bed, the table, the chair, the latrine, the spigot… they were all there. There was only one thing missing. The scarlet nub of chalk she had just seen a minute ago was gone. Was her memory playing games with her once again, or were they trying to taunt her? Her already brisk heartbeat got faster. Ziya sat down on the edge of her stone mattress and sobbed.

After what seemed like hours, Ziya heard a beeping sound coming from the door. Without a creak or a squeak, the door slowly swang open revealing the eerie silhouette of two of Them in their suits. Without hesitation or small talk they grabbed her by the arms and lifted her. Ziya resigned herself to the process. This particular day had drained her. She did not have the energy required to hold herself up, and much less to fight Them over what seemed inevitable.

They walked out of the room and unto a seemingly endless white corridor with only a few metal doors on either side and one big, red door at the end of it. “That must be the exit”, she thought, but she did not have it in her to fight them off and run towards it. They continued to lift and drag Ziya’s exhausted body down the hall. One of Them opened a door to the left of the corridor. Suddenly some memories came rushing back to her.

Ziya saw two more of Them standing next to a steel bed. She recognized one of Them but didn’t quite remember why. They placed her on the steel bed and restricted her limbs with metal buckles. The restrictions seemed like a tiny part of a choreographed set of actions since They didn’t seem concerned about the possibility of Ziya actually trying to escape. It seemed almost like a ritual.

“Ziya Taleb. Are you ready to confess?”, said the one she recognized. Ziya knew what They were talking about. This was never about the tallies or the chalk. She remembered now.

“I am not”, she said softly while regaining some of her composure. They proceeded to lift her frayed gown, exposing her abdomen. Forty-seven squares, each one with a line across it. They took a small blade and with the precision of a machine carved another small line next to the last square. The wound hurt Ziya, but not as much as she had been hurt before.

This time, like every time, she promised herself she would remember.

They unbuckled her restrictions, helped her up, and lifted her once again to take her back to her quarters. Back in the hallway, she tilted her head briefly to catch a glimpse of that elusive red door, but much to her surprise it was not there.

They opened the matte, metal door, placed her on the floor, and locked her in. She gathered herself and her thoughts. She was exhausted. She looked around and saw nothing. No bed, no table, no chair, no latrine, no spigot, no chalk…

Ziya took a deep breath and found comfort in it. Staring at those same blinding lights she thought about all the actions she had taken which led her to that exact point in space and time. She did not have any regrets. Ziya knew real pain, and she felt it often, but she also knew that just like those fluorescent lights that consistently kept her awake, her shine would never dim.