Chapter:5
No other incident occurs while we walk to the main doors. When we finally reach it, my headache stops abruptly, as though it was never there. I can’t help but relax a little, now that the pain is gone.
We glance behind us, no one is parading the corridors at the moment. It’s now or never.
I hold the right door handle, while Tina holds the left, and we both pull, ready to see the sky for the first time in years. I can feel Tina’s enthusiasm radiating from her like sunshine on a hot day. However, I can not allow myself to feel the same. This is too easy. They could’ve figured out we were going to escape just by watching us talk in our cells. Then again, why did they make me know her ? Did they do this to the others too? For what purpose?
Maybe they pitied us and decided we needed company. Even though I find their kindness unlikely.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, we’re finally out! The outside world unravels before our eyes. It’s beautiful, it’s magnificent, it’s —-
Black.
I’m about to cry for the second time today. Where’s the sky? If this is it, and it’s night, where are the stars?
Where are we?
It’s an underground tunnel.
All this time, we’ve been underground and we haven’t known it.
The nauseating smell from inside the facility disappeared. What filled our lungs now was the smell of damp soil. I don’t know how I know this, but it reminds me of the smell inside a mine. Our invisibility has become unnecessary in the darkness, so we will it to stop and just hold hands, advancing slowly through the dark maze.
The silence is deafening, the darkness is blinding. I’m glad they didn’t imprison us in darkness instead. One would voluntarily lose his mind here.
“Talk to me, Penny. So I know you’re here.” , Tina says after a while, no longer able to bear the silence.
“What should I talk about?” , I ask.
“Tell me what you’re going to do when we find the way out.”
When, I noted. Not if. She was doing her best not to sound too pessimistic.
So I tell her. I tell her all about my dreams of a better life. I speak for minutes, then hours, until my throat starts to feel hoarse from all the talking. I speak until my feet start to feel sore. The tunnel wasn’t planning to end. The tunnel isn’t ending. The tunnel will not end… I try to drown those awful thoughts somewhere in the back of my head, but they keep coming back at me, exhaustion encouraging them, desperation feeding them..
I could feel Tina’s mood plummet beside me. Her hand starts to sweat on my palm. She walks slower and slower. When I asked her what was wrong, apart from the tiredness, she whispered one single world, and I couldn’t help but shudder. Instantly wanting to get away from her.
Hunger.
I knew what this means. Despite my trust in her, I’m afraid for myself. I hate this. I hate fearing my one and only friend.
As though she was reading my mind, Tina gulps loudly, then manages to say: “Don’t worry, I would kill myself before I’m able to hurt you.”
I don’t know whether this makes me feel better or worse. Probably both. We both try to ignore our physical needs and keep walking.
This time, I strain my ear to detect any noises coming from farther ahead in the darkness. Nothing.
The silence still lingers, unforgiving. I fight the urge to scream nonsense just to break it, like a mad person would.
No, I’m totally sain, I shouldn’t do something like this. We walk ahead.
I don’t get it.
I totally don’t get it.
I’ve been hearing car noises for at least an hour but I’m not seeing any light, or touching any door.
In fact, I’m not seeing anything at all.
Maybe the darkness has long ago blinded me. Maybe I’m imagining things. I can’t even ask Tina, she’s way too tired to speak, way too hungry to utter a noise. Her last words spoken to me were a while ago. Time seems to stretch forever in this tunnel, so I don’t know for how long she hasn’t spoken. She only said that if she opens her mouth one more time, she wouldn’t control her hunger anymore, and I’d be in the realm of the dead before I pronounce the ‘S’ in ‘stop’.
How long are we going to walk?
Are we even going to make it?
I’m about to stop for a rest when I hear Tina collapse beside me.
“Tina! Wake up! You can’t die on me now! We’re in this together!”
She grips my arm just to reassure me she’s still conscious, then she crawls to the side of the tunnel and leans on the wall.
That’s how I know it’s over. We didn’t make it.
I should be crying out loud right now, freaking out, screaming ‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE’ between violent sobs. Yet, a strange calm descends over me. A part of me is sick of this life where I’m constantly threatened, hurt, cold, terrified, experimented on, driven to the edge of madness.
Perhaps that’s why I’m eagerly waiting for death to cradle me in his arms. However, there is one last thing I have to do.
If I failed to save her, I had to make sure she was gone from this world peacefully.
I hold her in my tiny frail arms, put a hand on her midnight hair and caress it. I try not to feel as though we’re buried alive under all this soil. No. I refuse to let my fear consume me, inching me closer to death.
“Listen to me” , I whisper in what I hope it’s her ear. “This isn’t the end. You know there’s an after, right? An epilogue to our story, a happy finale, a totally different world from this one.”
I have no idea what I’m talking about. I do not know what lies beyond life. I do not know what will happen to us. All I know is that once my friend sleeps, her dreams should, must be beautiful. Her dreams must show her deepest desires, and if she’s going to sleep forever, they might as well last.
“Maybe your body couldn’t see the sky, but I believe your soul can, and it will. You just have to believe. You just have to think about it the way you do when you want to fly.”
If she’s understanding my words the way I want her to, she doesn’t show it. I keep talking, determined to wash away her desperation with my voice.
“Blue” , I say randomly, and this stirs her attention, because she lifts her head weakly in my direction, looking at me but not really staring, as though what lies beyond my face were the unmistakable, endless, unknown, heavenly territories.
“blue seas and white whales and pink starfish. Bright sunshine that warms your bare thighs and hot beige sand that burns your exposed feet. No hunger. No fear. No pain.”
She looks for my face, puts a hand on my cheek to let me know I’m doing more than enough to make this easier for her.
“It’s okay, It’s okay” , I repeat, over and over again, and for once I believe it.
Ever since the day I woke up in a white bed and a room full of scary looking mad scientists, ever since my life filled with episodes of pain, screams, unconsciousness, then pain again, I somehow convinced myself I was born to be a rat for them. I was born to be experimented on then to die, without anyone ever caring. I longed for my parents, sure, but I didn’t think they will accept me once I got back to them in this shape. I was a puppet, not a human. What was the point in me surviving? What was the point of my life, apart from serving evil purposes? What did I ever do for the world to prove myself worthy of being called a human? What did I ever achieve that was for the sole reason of making myself happy and not my masters? I was something made of nothing. And Nothing shall be wiped out of existence, because it was never meant to be in the first place.
Then, came Tina, my first and only friend. I must admit that despite our age differences, her mind wasn’t as developed as mine was. I envied her for that. She didn’t have to think about her existential crisis like I did. She only had to go through life day by day, without ever thinking about the past or the future. Her only desire was to glance at the sky one more time and fly in its midst before her life came to an end.
I loved her way of thinking, so I went along with it. Our conversations became the only thing that made my life worth living in this mortuary filled with cruel scientists and desperate children. She made me discover my own abilities, proving I was not as hopeless as I thought I was. For an outsider, she was a monster. But she never believed that, not once. She had every reason to kill herself, every reason to hate herself. However, she chose to fight back, she chose to give her human part a chance. She chose to live through her crappy life despite what they thought of her, despite the horrible things she was forced to do to be able to live. You can’t change what you are, but you can change your opinion about yourself, and that’s how you get to survive.
I admired Tina’s sole existence. How she managed all this without anyone’s help but herself. When she asked me to escape with her, I found the perfect opportunity for my redemption. I knew that the only way to make up for my previous behaviour was to start a new life and become one of the humans on the surface. A girl who went to school and had crushes and threw a tantrum at her parents just because she wanted that particular doll and not another one exactly like it.
I was wrong.
I now realize it as I hold Tina in my arms and tell her tales of the first human beings to fly without any abilities and the first to visit the moon and come back to Earth, triumphant. I was pretty sure these stories weren’t imaginary, but I didn’t know where they came from, or who told them to me in the first place.
I could feel her interest without having to see her, and that’s when I knew why I was born. Sometimes, one person can be your ticket to happiness, even if it comes in the last moments of your life.
