I find myself sitting in a white room with four equal sized walls making a cube in an unknown place. I am not familiar with where I am. The first emotion that faces me is panic. Where am I? Why am I here? When and how can I leave? I assume the questions most would have when awakening in a mysterious room. Am I dreaming? Probably not. Everything I am seeing, though it is not much, is as clear as anything I have seen in my entire life. My life. What is my life? What is my name? Oh my god! Am I dead? I can’t be dead. If I was dead that means I had a life, but as far as I know life started for me in this white box. I look at the wall in my direction. Hanging on it is a ticking clock at what looks like eight feet above the floor where I sit.
The clock is not a regular clock. There are no marks and numbers for the hours, minutes, and seconds. The only mark is a thin red line marked along the clock’s radius. Only one arm is moving slowly in its direction. What happens when the arm reaches the red line? Is the room going to explode? That does seem a bit cliche. What if the clock is just there to scare me? Is that its only purpose? If so, I will not let it play tricks on me. I try to remove the idea of its existence from my head, but the constant ticking of each move of the arm does not allow me to. So I sit there angrily. And as I am pressing and spinning my head, as if I’m about to go mad, I see a clear glass pane in the wall to my left.
Outside the glass pane is a group of people playing on a grey flat top basketball court sitting in the middle of a green field. I can’t hear the basketballs pounding the court or the swoosh of the net. None of their eyes are facing in my direction and their faces are covered by a dark shadow. Do they know I’m here? Can they see the box from the outside? A ball rolls over to the box and one of the people come to pick it up. He, or she, seems to be completely unaware of the box. Then the person looks up. They’re face looks exactly identical to mine. I continue to watch them questioning if the man’s face was just my imagination playing tricks on me. I am unsure. The thought of leaving the white box never occurs to me until I turn around for the first time since I woke up in the box. I see a long and wooden door with a golden knob.
I realize that I had not seen the door for so long because I was afraid of what was beyond the box. When I first woke up in the box I was filled with panic, I became comfortable with the isolation and did not want to leave. I stand up for the first time and the head on top of my tall and skinny body slams into the ceiling. The room was larger than I thought. As the clock’s arm approaches the red line I decide it is time to exit the room and discover what the outside world has to offer. When I touch the doorknob, the arm reaches the red line and the clock falls and shatters into a million tiny glass pieces. I take one look back at the white room. I take my first step outside and all the memories of my life come flashing back to me like a movie in my head.
I approach the group of people I had seen through the glass pane and realize that they are all me, but happy and full of life. They were waiting for me to escape the place I was in, a place of isolation and sadness. I am invited to join them.