White | Teen Ink

White

November 7, 2022
By Anonymous

The room is empty and surrounds me in white. I walk to the walls. I trace the grooves and dents and bumps on the brick walls, surrounded with white. The great void surrounds me with white. The great void shrinks onto my senses. I feel helpless. I feel trapped. The walls of the white room close in on me. They loom over me and sneer. I collapse to my knees, overwhelmed with white. I grab my head and I claw at my hair, my skin turning red and white. I scream, my vision clouds with white fog. 

Violent flashes of color, color, strikes my head, highlighted with white. A woman in black, a triangle studded with white.

A knife of gray silver, a handle studded with white. 

A rope of dirty coffee brown without white.

A smooth gray cave of walls around me, whirring buzzing in my ears, boxes stacked up against the wall, painted white.

So much white and white covered with white. Too many colors replaced with white. The nerves at my fingertips flashes like lightning and thunder pounds in my ears, hot flames with white. More flashes stab at my brain, white hot as I feel bile in my throat, my vision blinded with white flashes. A low grunt of pain rises from my throat, yet I cannot hear it. The flashes of the colorful past have taken over my senses. They surround me, and I drink in a world that isn’t white. 

Why white? I thought white was good, white was yang embracing the black yin. But they always said too much isn’t good. They said that there had to be balance, the circle of black surrounded with white. Am I the yin surrounded by white? Or am I trapped in an endless yet suffocating white? I finally look down at my clothes. They too are sewn with white. Then perhaps I am not yin… Perhaps I have been devoured already. Perhaps I have been swallowed by the white. Eaten and digested, but never able to see a world of color again, forever to be stuck in the walls of white. Merged perhaps? I wouldn’t know. As far as I know, I’ll be here forever surrounded with white.


The author's comments:

In this piece, the character finds themself in a white room with only walls, and struggles with the shock. Here, using epistrophe, almost every sentence ends with “with white”, to embody the great void it feels like, and then the sudden suffocation. I use this phrase to breathe life into the violent emotions the character goes through. I also use a lot of repetitive phrases in parts to stress helplessness and slowly being driven insane.


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