Darkness.

It came and went like waves, sweeping me away, washing me away to a place where time didn't exist. First it was my friend, then it became my prison. I couldn't remember the last time I had been truly awake—fully awake, with thoughts, with memories. 

I'd been lying here for so long that I didn't know what to think anymore. Everything was a single, endless stream of pain and numbness.

I'd stopped counting. Days, weeks, years—they all blurred into a single, endless second. Time no longer meant anything. All that remained was the pain, eating deep into my bones, filling me until nothing remained of me except this burning agony. My body felt like stone—immobile, trapped in an existence between waking and sleeping, between being and forgetting.

Sometimes I wish I were dead.

But it wasn't me.

I couldn't do anything. I could only feel.

The pain was my only proof that I still existed. Sometimes it was dull, hidden beneath a numbing heaviness that pulled me into nothingness. But then came the other times—the times when it consumed me, pulled me from the darkness, reminded me that I was still alive. 

Every fiber of my body cried out for movement, for freedom—but here I lay, trapped in this rigid cage of flesh and bone. My breathing was shallow, barely noticeable. My heart beat slowly, sluggishly, as if it were conspiring against me.

Sometimes, when the darkness lifted for a moment, I could hear them. Footsteps. Voices. Whispers. They thought I was gone. They thought I was too weak to hear them, to understand them. But I heard them. I heard everything.

And it was the worst torture of all.

Because it reminded me that I still existed. That I was still here. That I wouldn't be free. Maybe never.

I thought it would stay like this forever. That the darkness would eventually swallow me whole.

But one day a light came.

My light.