"Box"

The sand seemed to reflect more light than should've been allowed by the overcast clouds above. Or was it snow? The granular fields were paling and grey, like his skin. Shouldn't he have known wiser he may not have had the ability to meaningfully distinguish himself from the grey, bleak, indifferently malevolent dunes of sand spanning endlessly around him.

Every next dune in the expanse concealing the horizon, tauting him with the promise that the weary traveller may one day find himself in the company of the comforting rays emitted by the sun that had long been in hiding. But when the weary traveller should surmount the insurmountable hill in his way he will be met only with a shady hill to reflect on the futility of his efforts, before continuing his journey, lacking of respite or closure.

The years had been tough on him. He had begun to wonder on the nature of the box. Was it one with him or with the surrounding grey? Both? He did not know. He only knew it couldn't be neither.

Why? Because the box was all he had ever really known.

The box read 9:59 in red analogue text under the small glass screen.

The box, the sand, and the prophesied beacon of hope hiding behind the mounds in the horizon. Walking, and grayness. This was all he knew. He took another laboured step. 9:58.

The grey steel of the box, the pale of his skin, the suffocating fog, and the infinite grey sand all illuminated by the forever distant rays of promised release, dimmed by the clouds came together to create a hallucinatory state fuelled by a delirious hope in the hopeless, and sustained only through the meager grip on "sanity' provided by the resetting of the timer. 0:01. He pressed the button. 9:59. He had the timing down to the milisecond.

What was to happen should he abscond of his duty to reset the timer, he did not know. He did not know much. Much of what he knew he did not really know at all. He knew mostly greyness, exhaustion and a masochistic drive towards the literal light at the metaphorical end of the tunnel. These were the primal perceptions and feelings that spoke to him above all else. The fundamental pillars that his experience of reality consisted of. All else was theoretical. He thought that he knew that he would one day find that last hill in the distance and finally bask in the rays of warmth and comfort and colour provided by the prophecised sun. He did not know why he thought this, and in a timeless space all that was reality was that which the conscious participant could see and what he could feel. He could not find solace in his imaginations for the only thing he could imagine is the only thing he had ever seen or felt;

Reality for him was greyness, exhaustion, a timer and a phantom promise. These were the fixed and constant experiences distinguishing his consciousness from nothingness. If it hadn't been this way since time begun, the dread had encompassed his memories such that it felt as if it had. There was only the grey, and the box. All else was theoretical. The end of the tunnel was theoretical. Was it that the closure he had so resiliently chased could only be found within the ceasing of his consciousness? After all, it was escape from the grey he truly seeked. He was inbetween the something and the nothing and it was torture.

He came upon the peak of the highest dune he had yet braved. Echos of a lost dream gleamed on the apex from the skies above. A dream that began to fade years, decades, centuries ago. Were they glimpses of the light shining down over him, or the arms of death reaching out to him? He hauled himself atop the collosus. This was his life. This was his greatest achievement.

He saw grey. 0:59

With no affirmation of hope in so long that he had forgotten what it was he was hoping for, the primal instinctual drive to continue in him is devoured by the eternal grey. 0:10. He lie on the floor, the first glimpses of rest he has seen. 0:01.

His choice not to press the button was not a choice. He had forgotten what had made him choose to press it initially. 0:00

He lie flat on his back, the life draining out of his eyes as if the distinct, self aware energy that realised his humanity had begun to return to its chemical and atomic makeup. The endless grey ends, fades into the endless nothing.

The big bulbous ball of heat rises above his head. A colour he had never seen. He wondered what it was. Death? Or a machine being switched off? He had found the sun. He lay his gaze upon it, as he slips into the embrace of the void, and wonders what it was that had brought him here.