The Ouroboros Room

The room is unfamiliar. I do not know how I got there. 

Each time the room appears, and each time I continue to exist within them. Every time, desperately wishing and hoping for the exit, the entrance, the door that never appears. The rooms are never the same; they shape and shift with each blink of the eye. They never hold anything I can keep and each is different from the last. I can no longer remember the ones that came before.

I think I have been here forever, or maybe it has just been a few moments. I can never remember. The rooms are always changing, and I change with them. I no longer know who I am or where I come from. Was there a before? Will there be an after? 

The rooms change, and so do I. I feel myself slip between realities, shifting with the rooms each time. Yet, with every blink, the walls remain flat, and I can never find a door. There must be a door to something. When I came here, was there a door? Was there an entrance into this labyrinth, this behemoth of a maze, ever-shifting and changing like the scales of a snake, dappled in the sunlight of a hazy afternoon, twisting between the leaves of a garden? A garden. The picture flashes, vivid, between my eyes. I feel the warmth, the light, the dirt, and the leaves. I can see it. I see the snakes coiled and uncoiling between the plants, the fear that shoots through me at the sight of a dangerous creature. And then it is gone, changed with the rooms, lost forever. The rooms that never repeat, always different, each one unique. 

Eventually, I lay down. I don't sleep, only seeing each room as it shifts around me. It begins to feel familiar in its variety, the comfort of each time I open my eyes, it will be different. I don't know how long I've been here, but I'm beginning to think it has been forever.

Then the memories appear. 

They flutter in and out of my eyes and onto the walls of the room around me. I see them painted in vivid splashes onto walls as they move and change with each new room. Memories of a life played out before me in an everchanging theater. Was it mine, these memories? Is it the experience of a stranger's life? Made for me as a strange type of torture, forced to witness the joy of someone I will never know? To slowly become surrounded by the trappings of a life that I have never known? Forced with the wonder of if it was ever mine, once before the ever-changing walls. 

No, the walls are changing. The room changes, and I change too. I feel the memories blur over me, and I cling to them like they are mine because I desperately beg them to be mine. Memories of a warm summer garden, of sparkling water, dappled by the sun. The rain that pours, crisp and fresh with every season’s offering. I seize them all and hold them, desperate for them to become my own. 

The walls change, flexing, forming, and contorting around the memories I now hold. Walls covered in summer rains and winter snows, green leaves and blooming flowers, memories of places and times that I will never know as I remain between these walls. 

Suddenly, it appears. 

The window, now embedded in the wall, stays the same with each new variation of the room. Outside of its glass is pitch black, an inky swirling sea of a place that I do not know. Does anything exist out there? Or is it just one more part of the room around me? The window draws my vision, the memories swirl around it and I remember a place that once had windows. A place that I almost feel sure I once called my own. 

Moving closer, I peer into that darkness. The glass is cold against my skin; I press my face against it and stare into that swirling night until colors swim and dance in my vision. Entranced, I watch them until they begin to morph, forming horrendous faces appear that swirl in that sea.

I recoil in horror, the room has betrayed me. The faces haunt me, shattering the joy of their uniqueness with the horror of the nightmare that lies beyond, corralling me back into the comfort of the room. The window seems to become a gaping hole that I might become sucked into if I draw too close. The room changes, but the window with its haunting faces and ink-black sea stays the same.

The window stays and soon multiplies. There is nowhere that is safe now in my ever-changing room. The windows leer at me, their eyes shaped and judging as I cower. The memories painted around me are no longer my own as the windows watch me. They gaze at me with anger and fear as I cannot escape. Their ceaseless gaze and the darkness that was once outside begin to seep in, crawling and dripping down the walls. Covering the memories of beautiful things that were once, maybe, my own. They spread over the sun-dappled gardens and waters, the raindrops and the light, infecting and spreading across the life of one that was not my own, but one that I held with such vigor that I made it my own. The darkness creeps toward me with the certainty of its destination. There is nowhere for me to go, and the eyes are always watching. My presence is always known. The walls change, but the darkness grows, creeping and slithering toward me like the snake of a garden I can no longer remember. 

I can no longer see the walls of the room as I try to hide. It will come for me and I will become part of its dripping, creeping darkness. 

The rooms change, but I no longer see them, my eyes shut tight against the growing horrors around me. I do not want to see it when the darkness reaches me, when it crawls up my skin, covering my mouth, my eyes, until I am one with it, and the room and I are no more. The comfort of the wall behind my back is the only stability I know as I wait for it to end. 

Suddenly, behind my closed eyes, I feel a breath of air, a freshness that reminds me of things I no longer remember. I open my eyes and I see it, the thing I once longed for when I began my journey through this maze of walls and memories. 

The door is vivid in its freshness. To it, there is a path, a path that leads towards it, cleaned of the tepid darkness. A light seems to shine from it, and I embrace it. There is freedom out there, and I desperately long for it. The darkness threatens to creep towards me, the windows watch, their gaze burning, as I finally escape their treacherous gaze. The door opens, and I am free. 

I move through it and finally feel the release of the eyes that haunted me. That black darkness cannot reach me as I exit that room of flashing memories, changing walls, and driving eyes. I exit the room, the door closing behind me. 

The walls are bright, and I blink. 

The walls change around me and I am lost. 

The door behind me is gone, but the sense of being watched lingers. The memory of a swirling black sea, faint and foreign, lingers, as unfamiliar as the walls around me. 

I am lost but I do now know how. The walls around me swirl and shift. They terrify me, how do they change? I exist within their walls, but I do not know who I am.  

The room is unfamiliar. I do not know how I got there.