The same darkness as before. A grey light crept through the ceiling — a tiny window, no larger than a crack in a wall, like a single hole in a cake, letting in just enough glow to remind you that the sun still existed somewhere.
A man sat alone. He looked around. How many minutes had passed? An hour? He did not know.
This time, there was no food. No water. Nothing but the man and the dark.
Qingren stood. He walked to the walls. He pressed his palms against the cold stone, then his fists. He ran along the edges, searching for a seam, a crack, a hidden door. Nothing.
He crawled. He kicked. He punched until his knuckles bled.
The stone did not move.
Hours passed. Maybe more. His throat became dry — a desert of sand and ash. He screamed into the emptiness.
"Water! Give me water!"
His voice bounced off the walls, returned to him distorted, as if the room were mocking him. No answer. No door opened. No smiling man appeared.
Finally, his legs gave way. He lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling. The tiny window watched him like a cold eye.
Alone.
He began to talk — to himself, to the walls, to the darkness. He spoke of his mother. Questions poured from his lips like blood from a wound.
Why is she there? Did they capture her? Does she work with them?
He did not know. The not-knowing was a weight on his chest, heavier than any chain.
His mind drifted to Jeffrey. To the old general. To the child with the hopeful eyes. He missed them — not as friends, but as fellow prisoners in a world that had forgotten them.
This time, there was no sound. No voice. No breathing but his own.
Just the dark. Just the silence.
Hours passed. His eyelids grew heavy — first a flutter, then a slow descent, like curtains closing on a empty stage. Sleep came not as a relief but as a surrender.
After more than thirty hours of terror — two dead bodies, a judgment, a blinding, a mother's voice — he finally closed his eyes.
He slept.
I do not know how long I was out. One day. Maybe two. I cannot remember.
Then — a sound. A huge, crashing boom.
The sound that had woken me a thousand times. A million times. I knew that sound in my bones.
The door. Shutting.
I sat up. My eyes scanned the room. Nothing had changed — the same grey light, the same stone walls, the same suffocating silence.
But then I saw it.
A box. Wooden, old, like a treasure chest from a forgotten story. I crawled toward it. My fingers trembled as I lifted the lid.
Inside: crackers. The kind of food they give you to keep a life barely alive. Water — seven or eight bottles of fifteen liters each. And clothes.
I understood then. I would not leave this place for a long time.
Days passed. The same routine, repeated until it lost all meaning.
I woke. I exercised — push-ups, sit-ups, anything to keep my body from forgetting it was alive. I drank small sips of water, rationing each drop like gold. I ate a cracker, then another, then stopped before the hunger returned.
Again. And again. And again.
I am tired.
I started to feel lonely. But what is loneliness? Is it something I had never felt before?
I had felt it. The day my father died — I stood in a room full of people and felt utterly alone. I wanted my mother to hug me, but she was not there. I wanted a friend to speak to me, but no one came. I went to my brother, but he had his own grief and could not hold mine.
I was alone then.
So why does this feel different? Why does this loneliness cut deeper, spread wider, linger longer?
I looked at the tiny window. The grey light had not changed.
And I began to think.
What Is Loneliness?
............
a man does not feel lonely when he is alone.
A man feels lonely when he is not with himself. You can live alone — no one knowing your life, no one at your door — and you can feel happy. Not sad. Not lonely. You are alone, but not lonely.
But you can be surrounded by a thousand friends and still feel the cold ache of loneliness. It is not the number of people that matters. It is whether those people make you feel like yourself — or whether they are just bodies you spend time with so you do not have to face the silence.
This is the difference.
A lonely man is a man who does not accept the fact that he is alone. He fights it. He fears it. He fills his days with noise and faces, but inside, he is hollow.
A man who is alone and feels happy — that is strength. Because he has accepted his aloneness. He has learned to love it.
Loneliness is when you do not accept what you are, where you are, or how many people are with you. To be alone is to be with yourself. To be lonely is to be without yourself.
When you are lonely, you are not thinking about you. You are thinking about others — and your lack of them. That is the difference.
And that is why Qingren felt lonely.
Not because he was alone in a dark room with no one to speak to. But because he could not stop thinking about them — his mother, the old man, the child. His mind reached for them like a hand reaching for a light that had been switched off. And every time he grasped, he found only air.
That is loneliness.
You can feel loneliness in the presence of others. But you will never feel loneliness while you are truly with yourself.
.........
The Routine
The same routine. Again and again.
Wake up. Exercise. Stare at the walls. Eat a cracker. Drink a sip of water. Wake up. Exercise. Wash yourself with a few drops from the bottle. Eat. Drink. Again. Again. Again.
I was waiting. For someone. For the smiling man. For the voice of my mother. For anyone.
I do not know how many days passed. But I knew it was not a week. It was more. Two weeks. Maybe three.
The food began to shrink. Few crackers left. Two, maybe. One bottle of water remained — half of it. I rationed every crumb, every drop.
I waited for them to come and give me more.
Two days passed. No one came.
I was alone.
.......
I started to grow used to it. The silence. The darkness. The slow crawl of time.
I began to sing — old songs I had heard as a child, songs my mother hummed while she cooked. My voice was cracked, unfamiliar, but it filled the room. It reminded me that I still had a throat, a tongue, a breath.
I began to think about my past. About my sins. About my mistakes.
Then I crossed my legs — the lotus position, the way I had seen in pictures. I closed my eyes. And I began to meditate.
In the dark. Alone.
I thought about the world. About myself. About the strange beauty of everything — the way light falls on water, the way a child laughs, the way a mother's hand feels on a fevered forehead.
Then I thought about my father.
That crazy man. The one who hit us so hard that my brother lost an eye. The one who raged like a wild horse, breaking everything he touched. The one who raped my own sister.
That man.
I felt nothing. Not hate. Not love. Not even anger. He was a stone on a road I had walked long ago. I did not hate him — but I would never love him as a father. How can you love someone like that?
I thought about my mother. How he beat her. How she tried to protect us — her small body standing between him and my sister. How she shielded us with her own bones.
Sadly, nothing changed. Until the day he died.
What should I say? Until the day he was killed.
I opened my eyes. The grey light from the tiny window had not moved. The room was the same.
But something inside me had shifted. A small stone had turned over. A memory had surfaced, then sunk again.
I closed my eyes and continued to meditate.
The darkness welcomed me like an old friend.