I had always liked chains. Not anymore. I had enjoyed the cool feel of the metal as it wrapped itself around me. But not anymore. I used to hate my freedom and would chain myself at every opportunity. But now, now.I longed for that freedom. The heavy chain that was fastened around my wrists weighed down my arms. My shoulders ached with the strain of carrying, dragging that weight around. I wanted to lie down, to give my arms, my shoulders, my back a break, a respite from the burden that it seemed like I had been forced to endure for days, weeks, months, perhaps even years. How long was it in truth? I have no idea. I was completely in the dark, literally. I had been deprived of any light. There were no windows in this room that had become my prison. I never felt the sun on my face; never saw the moon shining in the night sky. I saw.nothing.

I had no way to tell the passage of time. I had nothing but my thoughts.and the chain that dogged my every movement. Even the meals, if they could be described as such, did not come at regular intervals. I was purposefully being even denied that one normality. Sometimes a huge amount of food would be sent up, or down, I wasn't really sure, the dumb waiter. At least that's what I thought it was. The reality could have been far from that. I couldn't see. My hands had become my eyes, the only thing in which to send information to my brain. I would check there often, that little recess, for sustenance, but probably more for something to do than anything else. Sometimes, only a small portion of food would be left and I would worry on those days, worry about how much or how little of it I should actually consume. As I've said, I never knew when I would get some more. As far as I could tell, who ever had decided to keep me locked away in a cocoon of perpetually darkness and silence, didn't have a set schedule.

There was little to do, and on the days when a lot of food was left, yes, I would play with it. A loaf of bread would become a puzzle for me. I would tear away large pieces and then spend blocks of time trying to fit them back together again, try to reassemble the chunks back into some semblance of the original loaf. Pretzel sticks would become impromptu Lincoln logs and I would build a better home for myself, on a much smaller scale of course. Or I would craft some neat feat of engineering ingenuity. Usually, there was something mushy included, cream of wheat, grits, oatmeal.something like that. And I would spread it out on a section of the floor and play tic, tac, toe with myself. Of course, it was always a draw. But it gave me something to do, such as it was. I had been stripped of all sense of humanity. What else could I do?

There was never a shortage of water and for that I was grateful. The stagnant atmosphere of this airless room created a powerful thirst and I think that if I had been denied water, I would have gone quite mad. How far I was currently from that state, I had no way of knowing. My thoughts seemed to be fairly lucid, but who was I to judge? I had nothing to go by. My past, my former self seemed to be such a shadow, a dream that was fading more and more each day. And each day I wondered when I was going to awake and realize that I remembered nothing about how life used to be, how I used to be. Each day I tried to spend time in reflection, tried to fall asleep each night thinking of the things that I used to do, normal things, like laundry, or house cleaning, or even walking my dog. I know it sounds silly, but it was the little things that I missed the most. I felt like I was being kept in a glass jar for someone else's amusement. My very existence depended on the little dumb waiter that shuttled life saving food and water to me. But not on a regular schedule.

Some days I did experience hunger and I would suck down large quantities of the water that never seemed to run empty. That was the one thing I could depend on…I always had plenty of it, to drink…or to wash. I was probably cleaner now than I had ever been. I had nothing to fill my time with, especially when the food was scarce. So, what else was there to do? I washed.and washed.and washed. I had gotten used to cold water bathing. It was nothing to me now. The room was plenty warm, almost too warm. I guess it had to be since I had neither clothing nor any blankets or covers in which to cloak myself with. There was a time that I couldn't sleep without a host of pillows surrounding and cradling my head. But I had learned to make do. Well, learned is not exactly right. I did make do. I had no choice. I had a bare room as far as I could tell. Nothing hung from the walls. There was nothing but hard wood beneath my feet. There was no bed, there were no chairs, no tables, nothing but smooth surfaces all around. That was my world.

I had long since given up hope of anything changing. The anger at my circumstances only made it all the harder to get through another day, or at least what I had now termed "day". Some "nights" I slept better than others, but I think that it was due to the fact that on those "nights", something special was slipped into my food to ensure a soundless sleep. I would wake and find my nails trimmed, my hair brushed out and rebraided. I would find myself shaved.everywhere. Oh, I don't think that I was used sexually. I would have felt the effects of that at some point. There would have been a feeling of soreness or of having been stretched. There would have been. I would also find the floors beneath my feet devoid of crumbs and other debris, mainly dust and food scraps, my tic, tac, toe board. I would find the smell in this little darkened chamber a bit fresher, the hole in the floor cleaned of my excrement.

Someone was taking care of me. That much I knew. I was healthy. I hadn't suffered so much as a sniffle since I had gotten here. But the why of the whole situation, I just had no answer for that. I sometimes would wonder if it would ever change.if I would ever see the person who was responsible for it. Hell, I wondered if I would see anything, anything at all again. Sometimes a vague and unsettling thought would flit through my mind.would my eyes even work? Could the muscles in the eyes cease to function without regular exercise? Would they? I had never studied the workings of the human eye. Who would have thought that that information would have come in handy? I certainly never had.

The day that I arrived here, it seemed so dreadfully long ago, started out like any other day in my life had started. There had been nothing in the days and weeks before that one blinding moment that would have indicated anything other than a quiet end to a quiet day. Trust me. I had thought about it.a lot. I had nothing else to do. My mind, my memories were the only company I had. This place was sterile, devoid of anything, devoid of any distractions. I used to hum and sing to myself, if for nothing else to convince myself that I still possessed my voice, my ears. But after a few weeks, I stopped even that…it just brought back too many memories and every time I couldn’t remember the next line from a favorite song, I would get mad at myself, rail against fate, against God. It got me nowhere. It served no point.

I had not been physically harmed in any way whatsoever. In fact, I had been well taken care of.at least physically. Even my abduction, my imprisonment had been handled gently, if such a thing is possible. I didn’t recall feeling any pain, or even anxiety. The anxiety, the fear.they came later.after I had been locked into this darkness.this interminable darkness. Truthfully, I wasn’t even certain how it did go down. Who ever my captor was, he or she knew a great deal about drugs, with their effects, with how to mask them. I didn’t taste anything funny in my food that day, and hadn’t since then, either. But I knew that I had been drugged, and I knew that on occasion I was still drugged. For whatever reason, I was not allowed to experience sensations.of any sort.

Maybe that was one of the reasons I washed so much. I hoped to feel the coolness of the water upon my skin. The water wasn’t cold, mind you. Oh, in my mind it was, but on my skin, it was barely discernible, a pressure more than a sensation. The room was a bit warm.well, even that is not accurate. Heat and cold, those sensations were, at that point, all just in my mind, merely something that I longed to feel. When I sipped the water, I could feel the moisture replenishing my dry mouth, soothing my dry throat. But I couldn’t really feel it as it touched my lips, my tongue, slid down my throat. It was room temperature, or whatever temperature it was that managed to keep me from either feeling overly warm, or overly chilled. If I was quiet and stood in the center of the room, I felt.well, I didn’t feel. And I believed that was rather the whole point.

The only thing I felt was the chain, the damned chain. It was the first thing I became aware of when I woke up here. And really, it was the only source of true discomfort for me at all. I remembered how cold my feet used to get, how cold my hands and fingers would get, how I would trip over the keys of my computer as I typed an early morning or late evening email. But not any longer.not any longer. I was always comfortable…with that one exception. It was almost like I lived in a state of homeostasis.a perfect balance. The only thing that upset that balance was the chain; that was something I could never ignore, never forget.

Sometimes I would jump up and down just to hear the clank clank clank of it against the hardwood floor. It was a sound, something foreign to me, something I hadn't enjoyed in a long time. It was a love/hate relationship. I hated the chain.but it was the only thing that provided any sensation, any stimuli in my otherwise deadened existence. I hated it. But it was all I had.

The more I thought of it, the more it drove me batty. Some days, it was a monkey on my back. And on others, it was my best friend, the only thing that let me know that I was still in the land of the living.how living was anyone's guess. I gave up trying to figure it out some time ago. It required too much energy, too much work. And just tied my mind up in knots all over again.

I only knew a few things locked away in the darkness like that. One of them was that the next day was going to be exactly the same. The bland taste of the food would be the same, the quantity might be different, but as I welcomed hunger, hunger being a sensation after all, that never bothered me. The water would slip down my throat without me ever tasting it, my eyes would pierce the darkness and not see a thing…and through it all, a shadow in the unending pitch black of my world, the chain…pulling at me, rattling, clanking…my only discomfort…my only solace.



Part II

More time passed. How much, I still had no way of telling. The days rolled one into the other, slipping into history with nothing to mark their passage. After I had been there what I now imagine to have been about a year, I experienced a rare moment of anger, of defiance. I wanted to feel, to laugh, to run and play, to experience life again. And I did run, taking laps around the room, the chain, my ever present companion, clanking loudly in protest. And I did laugh, though it sounded a bit hysterical even to my own ears.

It wasn't long before exhaustion called a halt to my antics. I had not exercised that vigorously in a long time and I came to a sudden halt, standing there in the middle of the room, my chest heaving from my exertions, a sheen of perspiration dotting my brow, coating my skin. It took a few minutes for it to set in.that my heart was beating rapidly, that I was sweaty and hot. I was hot. Everything snapped instantly into focus. It must have been the increased blood flow to my brain. Whatever it was, I had a moment of clarity the likes of which I had not enjoyed since I had been taken. I was hot. I was hot!

I raced over to the two buckets of water that were always present in that little recess in the wall. I reserved one bucket for washing and one for drinking. I first dipped my cup into the bucket on the right and gulped it down. I smiled in triumph. The water felt cool against my lips, on my tongue. It felt refreshing as it traveled down my throat. I had been right. The exercise had increased my body's temperature.now, the water was significantly cooler. I picked up the wash cloth that hung over the bucket on the left. I hurriedly immersed it in the water and then wrung it out over my chest, letting the water dribble where it would. The joy I felt at that moment can't be described. Goosebumps broke out all over my chest. I shivered and jumped with the sudden and now alien chill. Some would say that it was the endorphins from the exercise, but I knew better. My euphoria couldn't be laid at their doorstep. It came from within. For that moment, I had won. I had finally discovered something I could control, a circumstance I could alter, could change.

That moment changed everything. My brain started working again and I began looking at ways that I could take back my life, on a limited scale. Some things were unavoidable, undeniable. I was never going to get out of this stark prison. I was never going to know true freedom again. But a caged bird merely needs to learn how to fly again, how to soar within its confines. And I had just learned, I had just found a way to experience freedom even while locked away, despite being locked away. My soul rejoiced. My spirit sang. And I prayed. I dropped to my knees and thanked the Lord Almighty for this wondrous gift. I hadn't talked to God since I accepted that I was never again going to marvel at His creations.that was quite some time ago. I struggled to remember the Lord's Prayer.whether or not I got it right.well, I hoped that I had, but I was sure that even if I hadn't, that God wouldn't mind overly much. We were finally talking again. And I felt His grace and His peace fill me. It was the best day I had there.the very best day.