This was something that I'd written for English homework this year.

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Taken

By Dark Ice Dragon

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Trapped. I was trapped in this room.

How long? How long had I been here for? Hours. Days. Months. Who knew? Who cared?

No one did.

If someone cared, they would have come. If someone cared, they wouldn't have stopped searching for me. If someone cared...I wouldn't be here.

Alone.

In this silent, brightly-lit room. There were no windows. The lights were controlled by the people on the outside. On the other side of the door.

Already, my life seemed to exist solely in this room. To me, there was nothing outside the room. Only the one who slotted my food through the flap on the door acknowledged my existence. Or the only one who knew that I was here.

The only object in this room was the bed that I always sat on. The sheets were always clean, no matter how much they became crumpled from my nightmares. I don't know how they stayed so clean as I had never seen anyone come in to change them. I had not seen another face for...a long time.

When I was first brought here I was always falling asleep. It had confused me at first until my head had cleared enough to realise that I had been drugged. It seemed strange that I wasn't able to tell. I didn't know how long I had been sporadically sleeping for once I was able to think rationally.

Now, I no longer have set times for which I sleep; I sleep when I feel like it or think that I've gone too long awake. Since I was always on the bed, I would usually find myself waking up without even realising that I had fallen asleep.

It was better that way.

To continually sleep, that's what I wanted to do. To forget the room. To pretend that I wasn't in it. To dream of freedom. Sometimes I wished that they continually drugged me so that I wasn't aware of what had happened to me. So that I didn’t even know who I was. So that I forgot the people who were missing me. Who I missed.

I felt like that whenever I thought about them, I would - I closed my eyes. As if I could stop my thoughts by doing that one action.

I wanted them here. No, I didn’t. I wanted to be there with them. Not here. Never here. I wanted to be in their arms and have them tell me that it was okay, that I was going to be just fine, as they always did. I wanted to be told that everything that had happened was a dream, a nightmare.

No. Stop it. Stop thinking about them. It would only make it worse. Thinking about them made everything so much more real. It made me painfully aware of everything. Of how lonely I felt, of how bright the lights were to my eyes, of how I suddenly remembered how long my arms had been curled around my knees with my head bent over them.

I slowly unclasped my hands and stretched my legs out in front of me. I hadn't realised that they had gone numb but I was made aware of that fact once I felt the pins and needles creeping down them. I arched my back from its curved position and heard several bones pop loudly.

It didn't matter, really. I would end up in that pose sooner or later whether I thought of it or not. I would be like that with my back against the wall or on my side, breathing in the scent that came from the sheets.

At those times, time crawled but it also passed quickly. It was as if I was in a trance. My thoughts swirled in my head while my body lay there, motionless. I thought of nothing and everything. In my head, I was free; there were no boundaries, I could do as I pleased. But once I shook myself away from fantasy, I found myself still in the white room. Sometimes though, there were signs that someone had come in while I was distracting myself -the air smelled fresher or I was underneath the covers when I was sure that I had been on top of them before.

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I blinked as light flooded into my eyes. Had I fallen asleep again? I must have.

I shook my head to clear it (not that I really wanted it to but I usually preferred to think than not) and listened as my hair and clothes rustled in the air.

The loneliness was terrible but the silence that reigned was worse. I used to want to break the quiet but it was pointless; who would come? What would it achieve? Nothing.

I turned my head when I heard another sound. The door was moving… It was actually opening…

Standing in the doorway was a silhouette of a man. Why… Was I finally allowed to go?

“Come with me,” he said.

I followed.