That Room

Without moving, without consciousness, without hope, he sat in that room, the tension in his body reflecting the turmoil in his mind. His hands clasped one another in fear; fear of the future. His shoulders were tense and aching from carrying the weight that was on his mind. But, if one part of his body betrayed his true state of mind more than any other, it was his eyes. Staring. Staring ceaselessly at one corner of that room. Behind those eyes his mind was, once more, torturing itself.

“Why had he done it?” That question returned to him a thousand times as he sat in his self-inflicted misery.

“Why!” spoke his lips silently; spoken more as an exclamation than a question.

He would have cried. He wanted to cry. But his tears had long since been expended. The awesome power of self-recrimination was tearing him apart; tearing him from the inside out.

Had anyone entered that room, they would have been able to observe his surroundings. They would have felt the aching inflicted on the eyes by the drabness of the walls. They would have been able to observe, hanging limply over the window, the net curtains, once white, now a faint, nicotine yellow. The net curtains succeeded in obscuring most of the weak November sunlight that had forced its way through the oppressive cloud cover. He, on the other hand, no longer observed those surroundings. They contained no interest for him.

Outside the window, children played. Their voices danced into the room, offering hope to anyone who would listen. A million such voices could not, though, have penetrated the depths of his self-tormented mind. And, had those voices penetrated his mind, who knows what pain they might have inflicted?

“Why had he chosen these surroundings?”

He felt hot. Hot, as if he were suffering from a fever. He was burning inside. He hated himself.

“Why had he made the wrong decision? Why?! Of all the options open to him, why had he chosen this?”

He knew he had to face his surroundings. Not because he wanted to, but because it was expected of him. He raised his head. He blinked. Slowly, he became aware of those all-too-familiar, drab surroundings. 

Glancing across the room, he saw the three plain wooden tables. On one table lay a drink. It was his drink, now cold. He vaguely remembered it as being coffee. He didn’t care; his sense of taste had all but disappeared. He saw a pile of notebooks, the contents of which were as bland as the dark blue covers that bound them. He stared at the books and asked himself again, “Why?”

Somewhere a bell rang. Bells were always ringing. They controlled his life. He lifted the pile of books and left that room. Breaktime was over.

It was time for him to teach another lesson.