Concrete Floors
I stare at the dull grey concrete floor and see all sorts of shapes and forms and characters appear and disappear in its erratic unpatternized patterns. Are they there? No. They are just the way my imagination wants them to be.
Sometimes a fish will leap about somewhere in the corner of my eye but when I move my eye to view it, it is gone. Was it ever there? No. It was just a figment of my imagination.
My imagination.
They say that you can see lots of things out of the small cell window - the city down below and all the people in it. But I see more on the floor.
I see cracks and little bits of rock and sometimes bugs and spiders and different shades of grey. I have heard of people who can read your future from the lines in your hand. I read the cracks in the floor. Is it true? No. It is just a production of my imagination.
But the cracks are real.
A guard will stop outside my cell and offer a game of cards or some conversation. I accept neither. I derive no enjoyment from those games. My past-time is spent in reading the floor. I see many things. Most of them are figments of my imagination. Why do I do it? I don't know.
We all do it.
Some may say that staring at the floor is a waste of time. What is interesting about a slab of concrete that never changes? It changes. A mouse has just run across it. Dust has been upset and rearranged - forever changing in infintesmal ways.
Troll
They sometimes call me Troll. My real name is Kris. I've always wondered why my parents decided to spell it with a "K" instead of a "Ch". Maybe they wanted the name to be different. Maybe they thought it looked better. Maybe they were too dumb to know the common way of spelling it. Troll is different - I like it.
Troll, Troll, Troll.
I don't know why they started calling me Troll. Maybe it's because I look different. Maybe it's because I act different. But all of a sudden, I was Troll.
I hate all of them. None of them understand anything. They laugh at me because I talk to myself. I am my best friend - why shouldn't I talk to myself?
Troll, Troll, Troll.
Sometimes I will try to tell them the truth, I will try to make them see. But they can't understand and they laugh and make faces at each other. So I talk to myself instead because I have no one else to talk to. Is that so strange?
Purple Morning
It is a purple morning. I wake up on the floor, staring at the gray ceiling, looking at the shadows cast by the sun streaming in through the cell window. Dark bars of grey. Why is it a purple morning? I don't know. It is how I feel.
I splash water on my face from the sink and feel droplets course down my cheeks and hang perilously upon my chin before diving onto my chest. Swimming, swimming, drowning.
Footsteps outside of my cell pace slowly back and forth. I can feel the guard's boredom, I can sense his mind flying against every wall, through every cell door, scanning the windows, looking for freedom. He is more imprisoned than I.
Swimming, swimming, drowning.
Freedom
I am released.
I have been sitting in that cell for sixteen years and now I stand here outside with the vast blue sky sprawled above me, the white, puffy clouds pushed about by the wind like waves. Where will I go? I have the whole world at my feet now, anywhere to go, but what difference does it make? I will still see those cracks and shades of grey dancing through my mind like the shadows of the window bars across the floor.
I decide to at least walk somewhere, to go away from the tall, barbed wire capped grey walls which I had been inside of for so long.
Walking down Bar Avenue, alongside a row of fresh green trees, my eyes start to hurt. Barely perceptible at first, but I start to grow more and more aware of it with each new thing I see. Yes, it is the colors. The stark white of the windowsills, the bright green of the leaves, the ocean blue of the sky - all of it gives me pain. I cannot look straight at them and instead look at the sidewalk as I walk. I grow more and more interested as I look at it, and eventually I stop, staring at the ground. I sit down and look at the sidewalk. Here! I am enraptured by the cracks and dirt of the sidewalk. How much more life has this seen then the floor of my prison cell! So much more to learn!
A Dash
A dash of purple streaked across the sidewalk. How much it changes everything! What would have normally been an uninteresting and generic part of the concrete turns into art. Just that little dash of purple, just that little bit, surrounded, nearly swallowed up by all the miscellaneous dots of gray. It makes me want to leap up in the air like a fish out of water!
It is dusk now, and I can't make out the purple dash on the pavement any longer. I can look about the world now with ease, for all the colors are fading into each other. With the darkness comes uncertainty in the vision, details cannot be made out, faces can't be ascertained, colors can't be tasted. The imagination takes place of vision and I see all sorts of strange creatures and forms around me. I am sure for a moment that I see a man slinking behind a house before me but it was just a leaf falling from a tree. I get up from the ground and dive into the darkness of the city.