“Run, run, run, as fast as you can,” the voices chant, endlessly, driving me mad. They hiss and crackle, coming from all sides. I’m running through something, but what, I know not. Everything is blurred, like I’m running through fog. It’s almost like a maze, but there is no end, and no way out. Tears race in a steady stream down my face. I have to get away, get away from them, these things that haunt me, torment me. “You can’t escape,” one whispers in my ear, and I spin to face my assailant, but there is no one there. “Who are you?!” I scream, desperately. The voices laugh simultaneously, hauntingly. I tear off down another pathway, hoping for an exit, but to no avail. I crumble to the cold, hard ground, curling into a tight ball. I clamp my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes closed tightly. “It’s not real, it’s not real,” I tell myself, hoping more than anything it’s true. I can’t distinguish between nightmares and reality. Sometimes I think they are the same.

I must be in the room, but I’ve no way of knowing, because I can’t escape the tricks my mind just loves to play. Yes, I tell myself, I’m in the room. I force myself back into my conscious mind, before any more demons can haunt me. This room is white, with foam padding on the walls and floor, and no windows, just a door without a handle. They said it was a fun room, and that I would like it. It was for “special people”, they said. I think it’s a torture chamber. They just tossed me in, and locked the door. “We’ll make the bad things go away,” they said. They lied. The bad things only got worse in here. I started remembering things since I’ve been in here, things I never wanted to relive. “Remain isolated” and “Prone to outbursts of psychopathic fits”, that’s what it says on my file. “Crazy,” is what they called me when they thought I couldn’t hear. That’s what got all of this started in the first place. My acute ability to hear everything. I can’t miss anything, but no one believes me. I can hear a man talking two miles away, if I tried. I can even hear the nonverbal things. Facial expressions tell me a person’s thoughts as easily as a billboard. This room made me focus in on my memories, since they are all I have left. I remember all of those nights. The night I heard a woman’s terrified screams, the night I heard repeated gunshots, the night I heard a baby’s cry stifled.

My ‘special’ power or whatever, it isn’t a gift. It’s what caused me to be put in this room. No one could handle my random outbursts of terror, as I heard some unspeakable thing from miles away. No, this thing will destroy me. This is no blessing, this is my curse.