the padded room

A blank effigy of power once stood in this room. This room, with its white box walls, reflects nothing. They make no statement on the nature of the lives they've seen. They give no tribute to past greatness, nor do they promise anything for the future. These four bare walls from an extremely empty room, sanitized of all feeling and seemingly devoid of any coherent thought whatsoever. This room reminds the viewer of a hospital hallway at midnight, completely alone, with the yellowish florescent lights buzzing down from the ceiling. Only this room is smaller than a hospital hallway. Its constrained squarish dimensions force themselves upon the mind, burning a claustrophobic image into the fragile human frontal lobe.

It exists as a cage, with one door on the north wall sealed shut permanently. Those who stand in this room cannot recall how they got there. They stair blankly around, hardly aware at all of their own existence. A viewer of such a scene would wonder whether or not such a futile existence is worth the effort it would take to form such an awareness. Certainly they are happier not knowing their position. Perhaps they were born there. This is why they continue to exist. Any free mind captured and forced to live in such a place would make itself sick, thinking and rethinking plans of escape like a wild animal pacing back and forth until they can pace no more. Eventually, they would turn instead to a more permanent freedom. A mind which wears chains ceases to function, and ceases to exist.

Why? That is the last question before their eyes shut and darkness frees them from the glowing walls of that white room. That is the question they have given up asking where they are, how they got there, who put them their, when they'll get out, and what the meaning of their imprisonment was. They ask why. Why, like the letter which seems to be a torso with two arms, but missing a head and legs. These visions, hallucinations on the imagined canvas of the wall, are the product of such tortured minds, wracked back and forth for some bit of reason the brain scrounging for a logical thought like a dog starving in the street, but finding none.

There are two choices, for the human mind is a unique mind and it has some options to protect itself from a final destination. The mind may either die, or it may, go elsewhere. Madness in this case is a state of self-preservation. The mind can not exist in this reality, so it escapes to another. There is some question over which is truly more important: a true reality or a perceived reality. It is often decided upon by a popular vote, meaning what is the most popular perceived reality becomes a true reality. Reality, it seems, is always negotiable.

So once again, the prisoners stair at the door. The door stairs back. The prisoners can here footsteps on the other side of the door. They imagine that they are monitoring them. They knows they are. The foot steps echo through the room, where they have slunk down in a far corner, starring intensely at the door. . . Those footsteps echoed in their heads, pulsating through their brain and vibrating within their skull, rhythmically, so that those footsteps were no longer footsteps, but instead a heartbeat: a heart beat from the terrible beings who had imprisoned them. They wanted desperately to cut off that heat beet, to squeeze it until it would beet no more, but still it beat on, like a clock counting upwards to infinity, the amount of time they had been here, the amount of time they would remain. "Tick tock tick tock," it mocked like a nursery rhyme: "Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock . . .". Damn mice, they thought. Why, of all disgusting creatures that could exist as their prison mates, would there be mice? They watched the mice in the opposite corner, dirty little rodents infesting their space. They despised mice.

Perhaps if the walls were any other color, perhaps a soothing blue, or a sunsh