The Way You Make Me Feel

It was all white, but not all right.

The walls were peeling, and paper thin, like the sheaves of a dusty, age old book. They could hear us, and we could hear them, a two way street of faceless whispers, haunting and taunting, speaking of untold secrets and unheard of stories, reaching immeasurable frequencies till it became a cacophonic din. But beyond their hushed whispers, they were nothing else. Maybe they were too distant, or maybe I was too delusional. I heard them, but yet I was not listening. Like a light switch, I had the ability to conveniently switch off. What was the downside? I was always left in the dark.
Bu things would change, and fast. The room was ever moving, but still sporadically stagnant, like the every growing, creeping algae that drifted on the surface of placid lakes, and simmering pools. Soon the paper thin, peeling walls would crumble, the facades would fall, and everything that was surreal, would become real. My legs would quiver, my heart would stop, and my pretenses would be parlayed.

Strangely, I was free, and yet I felt bound, trapped in invisible ties, devices that I had self-concocted and created; tangled and tossed, like an Antoinette doll, here every insecurity was magnified manifold, and every pimple felt like Pandora’s Box. Did I look any different from across the far-away wall, where the grass was conveniently greener and the air effectively cleaner?

This room was where we all lived with our inseparable insecurities, conjoined like Siamese twins, in an unending space of ten by eight, a muddle of skeletons that often got buried deep within our closets, long forgotten, or just cramped up behind years of secrets and unfitting clothes. Maybe we all had these secrets that we decided to take with us to our graves, things which we could have be ashamed of, things that we were in constant denial of, stuffed and squeezed into the room with the peeling paper-thin walls, not with unbound love and bursting happiness, but with malice and mirth.
Yet, the said room lay sparse, and wide like a fun house of mirrors, a series of distorted images, paralleling everyday life, where each reflection reflected something of me, and about me. It was a tell-all, a private place where you could publicly wash your dirty laundry and the fetid stench of decay and defecation rent the air. They would come, one by one, inhuman illuminations, each with their offense, at me, and through me, breaking me down, bit by bit, soul by soul.

I was match boxed in my own mess of introspection, and I inhaled and exhumed, through layers of memories and the other such clutters of an otherwise inoperative mind. Didn’t people say that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop?
The weak walls would close in, paper thin and peeling, like a trembling card castle, a fug of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts, each with its own subtext, till I was a non entity in all my entirety, submerged in random rubble and not so random thoughts. The room was dead and broken, and so was I.

Where was this that I was?

It couldn’t be any simpler and it almost seemed like an easy linear equation, I was in hell, or maybe I was just out of my mind.
Like they said, Hell was very badly done.
And in so many ways, I was too.