She would die in that metal box

Being lonely wasn’t a new sensation for her. She had been alone most of the eighteen years she had lived. There was a time she could remember when there was someone who cared about her. Her father? She couldn’t be sure if this part of the memory severed her correctly or if she had filled in the blanks to make the memory more desirable, something worth holding on to.

The darkness of her cell threatened to snuff out the memory real or not. Her eyes remained closed, it was easier this way. Constantly searching the black before her made her feel madder by the second. She didn’t even have the courage to move. Void air against the chill of the metal walls was prison enough to keep her in one spot. Her skin had succumbed to the abandonment, cracking and bleeding against the abuse of being left completely alone.

The story goes; that every child born will reveal their nature sooner or later, either greatness or great terror. Another piece of that memory, the one where she was loved, that person had pure white hair the mark of compassion. The only other person she has a memory of is the person who put her here. Their hair was the color of fire, which is the rest of the story; when a child’s true nature is revealed it is reflected in the color of their hair. 

Being alone was nothing new, and being forgotten was something she'd become very familiar with almost since the beginning. White hair a sigh of compassion, red that of hate. Black, from what she had heard signified brilliance, though she had never seen anyone with black hair and could not vouch for their promised ability to work any problem into a solution. Brown hair was the only color she didn’t know the significance of. It didn’t matter because in her cell it was only her and she didn’t have brown hair or black or white or even red. She didn’t have any hair. 

The red-haired person who put her in here had made jabs about the skin on her head. Calling her ugly, but she wondered if in his words she heard a tone of fear, a slight one but one nonetheless. She didn’t know why the white-haired man, her father, had allowed her to be brought here but she did suspect that because she could not be categorized by the color of her hair she was shunned or stollen or abandoned.

And the fear in the red-haired man, she did know why it graced his words when he spoke of her, she was nobody, weak, frail, and had nothing to offer.  Sometimes she found herself reaching up in the dark to smooth her hand over her head, just to check. Maybe today she would have started to grow hair, white maybe. Then she could say. “I’m compassionate. You can let me go free.” But then again the white-haired man from her memories was most likely not her father, but simply an apparition of hope. The skin stretched over her skull was beginning to flake from dehydration, the red-haired man hadn’t visited in what seemed like an eternity. Long enough for her to miss him and his hateful words. She lay curled against the smooth wall, the bones of her back and shoulders digging against her body in surrender to the solid metal surface. When she reaches out her fingers to touch the wall imagining anything but the prison she will never escape, her nails click in response, always a reminder of the capture that will forever be her reality. 

Today would be no different as she reached up to feel for hair that would not be there, as she reached out to the wall that would still contain her. Today she thought would be no different but she did it anyway. She allowed her hand to brush against the wall after dropping from her scalp. The same cold unyielding surface that met her hand every day for the past fourteen years.

The only offering of grace the red-haired man had given her was time, always telling her when it was her birthday. She didn’t know why other than using it as another way to torture her. There's nothing more cruel than reminding someone who has nothing, that their misery has grown with them. That loneliness is their only companion, their only constant.

She knew she would die in that metal box, a corpse with no purpose, a soul belonging to no one. She would die, but when? This she didn’t know. The fact that she had survived feeding only on darkness for fourteen long years was enough to worry her that there was a chance she would never die, never be released from her isolation.

She had begun to use her nails for another purpose too. When they weren’t searching for an existence beyond the walls they would dig at her cuticles, her wrists, her ankles. The blood had sprung and dried so many times she knew she had scarred. But vanity wasn’t something she had the luxury to comprehend.