My hands are unable to remain silent for long.  Through tortured blinks, their control slackens, and they start to screech against the surrounding walls. My brain follows their example – crying aloud for help, shouting at my body to stop running away.

My legs are twisting and turning, my eyes melting until all I can see is blackness; all I can feel are the sickening revulsions and unshakeable impulses that my body is enduring. The air gets tighter with every second that passes, compacting as the walls close in upon me like some sick gang with no motive but to quench their throats with my fear.  Always, my legs and arms flail; jumping into the walls, the ceiling, the bed below me – leaping into the darkness in the hope that they’ll escape it.

The room smells of decay – a shiver-inducing scent akin to that of burning sulphur. My brain is still howling, a wolf begging for its companions – longing to be somewhere, anywhere that is safe.

I never thought I’d become claustrophobic. Neither did I think I would ever grow up, or become involved with acts of violence, or lose all hope in the world. How wrong I was.  

In the past, my life has been a burnt plate of spaghetti strewn across sofas. It’s been cleaning up after disrespectful slobs in order to earn money, and it’s been saving someone I want to escape in order to make sure they don’t kill me. I’ve fallen in ditches, and I’ve fallen into forced love. I did all of that before I was seven, and was trapped whilst I did it – Just like with everything I did. That’s eventually become mirrored when I’m sleeping and showering – trying to live the life that I once never thought I could have.

As soon as I was born, my first rejection came with being rejected by my parents. Thankfully, however, someone that found me on the streets felt sorry for me and took me into their home, pouring love and affection into my life… but only for four or five years: they were killed by cancer, and I was soon out on the street again. I took to this environment pretty quickly: stealing food from tired shopkeepers, and making a living by selling jewellery I had pick pocketed. I was a thief at only five years old.

However, I wasn’t almost as street-wise as I thought. At about seven, I was kidnapped, and harmed in ways that I don’t want to talk about. Since then, I’ve had the image of a man’s bloody lips slowly crawling up and down seared onto my brain, an injury that just won’t heal. Upon the night of my kidnapping, I was killed.  

The next morning, I walked into a busy market square. Nobody so much as looked at me. I cried for help, jumping up at people; screaming. Nobody heard. All I can remember is feeling abject terror, like a tiger that got stuck in hiding, staring at it’s prey but unable to pounce. It didn’t take me long to realise that I was simply a stamp that had been stuck onto an envelope backwards, sticky side up, so a large envelope had quickly snagged me from my safer one… then dropped me, writhing casually through the air, to land on a well-trodden floor. Nobody noticed me when I was all the way down there, so I gradually dissolved, sank lower and lower into the ground until… here I am, old, tattered, and unnoticeable.

Right now, I’m cowering in an abandoned room that’s become ripped and torn through the years. The corners of the room are all covered in cobwebs, though there are no spiders in sight. There’s nothing in sight…no one to remind me of what I am. The room is small, to say the least. It’s dark, and quiet, and I’m alone. I’m scared. My arms are still running from me, my fingers seem to be attempting to scatter in different directions. My legs are just the same, writhing like two slugs in a jar of salt. The walls are still coming ever closer, but they never seem to reach me.

I’ve grown since I died. I’ve grown, and aged, but I’ve never been alive. As I beat upon the walls surrounding me, I know that I’ll never be able to break them. I know that I’ll never be heard, or improve my shitty life. I’m scared of my future. It can only get worse from here: I can’t live with just myself any more.