A futile gesture

You awake one evening to find yourself chained to an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. Undecorated and grim, it is a cell and you are the prisoner.

You scream, but but nobody comes. You scream aloud that you are not afraid; that you are afraid; that you never could be. You scream for solace. Nobody ever comes. Surely you are in an uninhabited wasteland. No living thing can hear your pleas.

Observing your naked body, you see a message has been hurriedly scribbled on your torso.

"I am coming. You will suffer."

In a panic, you writhe and struggle to escape your bonds before your captor can return and act on his vague threats of torture. You struggle until your struggling itself opens wounds, until you realise that this is a futile gesture. Slowly but inexorably the hopelessness of your situation crawls onto your consciousness, rising above every impression. You resign yourself to whatever fate your anonymous foe has planned for you. Slowly your misery strips you of all hope, save for that of a quick death.

Hours turn into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. You are nourished by your fear. Sustained by perpetual apprehension.

After many years you are an old, shriveled wreck. The ugly trifles of existence have driven you to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly. They irradiate the refuge of sleep.

You notice through a crack in the boarded window that the sun no longer rises. You turn your head to one side like someone who wants to be alone with their laughter.