I’m here. Here, where the world is always illuminated like 4AM on a chilly Tuesday morning. It’s dark, but not that dark. Like a wooden shack, lit by a single lightbulb, as the cold wind blows outside. Everywhere. Rooms and hallways, with windows where cold moonlight is seeping through blinds that cannot be lifted, and fluorescent lights that buzz in a low drone.

Sometimes, standing in the light, or a doorway, always shadowy but never in shadows, I see them. I don’t know who. But they’re there. They aren’t malicious. But I don’t want to turn my back to them. My insides pull away from them, but the air just outside of me seems to drag me to them.

There are two colors of light, no more, no less. There’s blue-white, which fills rooms but never enough to see much, and sharp yellow-orange, which fills the metal- walled, concrete-floored hallways and sticks to your skin like badly chlorinated pool water.

I’ve been here before, I’m sure of it. Everything, from the air temperature to the unplaceable smells that drift through the corridors, invokes a snip of a memory, from a time before I knew anything. There’s an answer to all this, an escape, im sure of it. But I’m not sure I want to leave. It’s nice here. Where here is.