existence
It didn't really mean anything, he thought, that he didn't remember killing anybody—or at least, that all his memories of killing people he was almost completely sure were dreams. He'd never trusted his memories; they were all in third-person. How did he know, then, that they belonged to him? How could he tell what was a memory of his life, and what was a memory of a dream?
He was starting to doubt, however, that he'd ever had a life outside of the gray cell, the artificial lights, the metal bars, the guards that occasionally walked by and slipped him food and water without looking at him.
They didn't look at him, so he couldn't know, from their reactions, anything about what they saw in him, and thus he couldn't know anything about how he appeared. If they'd looked at him, it would have been the closest thing he had to a mirror. He wondered if their expressions would have been as surprising as he was sure his own would be, if he could see it, or if he could even imagine it.
He couldn't remember, for the life of him, what his face looked like.
Sometimes, when they left him that plastic cup full of water, he wouldn't drink it for a while, despite the fact that his tongue was sandpaper in his mouth, as he tried to see if there was an angle at which he could see his reflection on the water's surface. But all he could ever see was the vague, dark shape of a head, features inscrutable.
He wondered what he looked like.
He could see that the skin of his hands, his arms, his feet, were pale and ashen, and that the ragged, unkempt, oily hair that fell into his face and got into his mouth was a dingy shade of brown. He couldn't remember what color his eyes were, but he figured that they were probably gray. They felt gray, when he looked out of them.
He guessed, also, that beneath his eyes were dark circles, because he hadn't been sleeping and when he pressed his fingers to the skin there, he found the area soft and puffy, collapsing under his fingertips. And if the veins in his wrists were so dark and close to the surface, visible easily through the caked layer of dried blood, then it must be even worse at the thinner skinner around his eyes.
He wondered if, at that point, he even looked alive. And he wondered if, on that line of thought, his existence could even be called living. Maybe he was simply a moving, breathing corpse whose heart hadn't yet realized it was supposed to have stopped beating.
He wondered if it would be better if his heart stopped. It couldn't matter to anyone else, he figured, if he was dead or alive and simply locked away; the results to them, he figured, were the same: he wasn't there. Did it matter whether or not he was still living and breathing somewhere?
Did it matter to him, he wondered, that he was alive? They could have had him executed. Was there a point to keeping him alive, locked away from everything?
People existed, he was pretty sure, in their interactions with others and the effect they have on the world around them. In his cell, he interacted with no one, and had no effect on anything.
If nobody heard him, and nobody saw him, he wondered, did he even exist?
I think, therefore, I am.
But was thinking enough? Could he keep up the will to live, simply in order to have these thoughts? Was that meaning enough to exist?
He stared at his mutilated wrists, scarred and scabbed; at the blood-tarnished handcuffs around them that no longer restricted him as much as they'd used to, he'd grown so thin (but the metal was as cold and biting as ever)—and he thought that it probably wouldn't be that difficult to end his life. Maybe that was what the people he was sure were somehow watching him wanted; just waiting for him to grow tired of the gray and the cold and the emptiness and just kill himself so they didn't have to.
He didn't fear the concept of death; a forever of nonexistence did not terrify him. But he did not, he thought, particularly want to stop living. Not when there were words, sentences, stories in his head that still begged to be written.
Whether those stories were true or false was of no consequence; there wasn't much difference between a truth and a lie anyway, he figured; not much difference between reality and a dream.
It didn't matter, he thought, whether he'd killed people and couldn't remember it, or whether he'd dreamed he'd killed people and couldn't prove that he actually hadn't. Either way, people were dead and he was locked away.
He wondered if, outside the gray walls of his cell, people had stopped dying.
He remembered, a few moments later, that people were always dying. Whether or not people were always living was, probably, a better question to be asking. Maybe life was nothing but a period of waiting for death to arrive.
If that were the case, then he figured he wasn't any less alive than anybody else, rotting away in a gray concrete box with metal bars on one side and spaces between them so he could breathe.
