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// It Came Like a Thief in the Night (Ki): The End of the Beginning 
// Story: Awkward Conversations And Other Stories 
// by No one is home 
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I sulked in the observation cell for what could have been hours or minutes.  The place was designed to deny me a sense of time.  It was made to give me nothing to react to, and no way to harm myself, short of running head first into a wall repeatedly until I was restrained for my own safety.  I had considered the option briefly.  Restraints were almost certain to come with sedation.  I needed to be sedated right then.  I needed desperately to forget, if only for a little while everything that had suddenly never happened again.
But more than that I needed to get out.  The words had put me back here.  Back on the first day.  Back in the cage.  All my earlier screaming had earned me extra security when the orderly came to bring me my sandwich.  Tuna fish salad.  It was always tuna fish salad.  This time through the loop they had taken my plastic-ware.  I tried to remember if they had done that the last time.  Much like the roll-down cage that kept me from doing anything crazy with the sink or toilet, I wondered at what they found to be the necessity of all this.
Did they really think I was going to drown myself in the toilet?  Or that I had enough energy or determination to stab myself to death with a plastic spork?  Or was it even my safety they were concerned with.  I always wondered just what kind of psychopath they thought they were dealing with... but ultimately it didn't matter.  They would transfer me over to the general population, sans pants and dignity, at 9:45, just like they always did.
The sandwich was unassembled, the tuna in a nondescript plastic tub in a little compartment with two slices of wheat bread, as always.  In a second compartment there was a whole orange, and in a third a four ounce foil-lidded cup of apple juice.  It always seemed strange that they would trust me with peeling my own orange, but not with a plastic spork.  Surely they must realize that I'm at least somewhat functional.
"May I use the sink, sir?" I ask the security guard in my most even, most polite voice.  They weren't going to let me out tonight, of course, but I still had three more days before it happened again.  Three more days to get out and... do what?
"Why do you need the sink?" the guard asked suspiciously.
"Well," allowed myself a little laugh, which earned me an even more suspicious look, "If you can't trust me with a spork, and I'm gonna eat tuna fish salad with my fingers, I'd like to at least wash my hands first."
Gods, it's not like you didn't watch me on the camera flicking boogers at the wall to pass the time for the last hour.  But I guess my request seems legit, because he rolls up the cage while another guard stands ready in case I start doing anything crazy with the facilities, and I wash my hands and eat without incident.  Everything has to be without incident, if they're going to let me out before the fourth night.  That's when the words are coming back.  I don't know what good it will do me to be not-here.  Maybe none.  Maybe the words can snatch me up wherever I go.  Throw me in that crazy world for however long it takes me to fail and then set me right back here where it started.  But if that were the case why always throw me back here and now?  Was it some test, one that I could never seem to pass?  Or perhaps it just needed that special desperation of, "they're not gonna let you out anytime soon this time to make me play along."
Eventually the doctor comes in.  The same doctor who never gives his name, and whose name I never ask.

“Do you know why you’re here?”  no Mr. Dr. Sir  that somehow eludes me.

And then I’m just not there anymore. I’m nowhere. And that’s when the words come.  It’s that moment is when I have to break down.  That is the moment it finds me.

~Where do you want to go?~

“For fucks sake just put me in front of a fucking train!”

~What do you want bring with you?~

“I don’t care.”

Why do I have to relive this so many times?  I’m too shocked to jump.  I’m too terrified to accept it.  The train is screaming at me now.  I’m going to jump.  I’m going to accept fate.  Im’ going to jump.  The train is going to stop. I’m going to accept fate.