#buriedcore

wet soil is covering your fingers. you're ten, and your peers are building mud castles. you chime in. let's see who can dig the biggest hole.

you're seventeen, and it's past sunset. you're standing at the empty subway station. it's separated from the main line, for now; the carriage to your right will take you back to it. the carriage to your left will never arrive. the tunnel not-quite-built is stretching forward, smelling like wet cement and a bit of damp soil. the infrequent light blinking is almost calling you.

you're twenty, and you're walking down the streets with seemingly no direction. there's a river far beneath your feet, taken from surface, cased below the ground. you can't see it, but you feel it running there, half by hints of smell, half by sixth sense. you close your eyes and see the hollow, dripping tunnels and water running past your knees. it's late spring, turbulent weather with heavy rains. every year when the rain season comes, the river overflows its prison, drowning those who dared to visit it. you want to go down there.

you traverse the forest, escaping the presence that doesn't claim you as its own. you return back to safe passages, beyond the undrawn line. there's a hole in the ground in front of you, when you emerge. you don't remember a hole that big being there. you could fit in there, whole.

the hole you dug up when you were ten could fit a child.

you inhale the smell of the subway and think that the tracks are not unlike bunkers. you close your eyes and feel the sprawling labyrinths of tunnels, and think about them spreading further, deeper.

the walls of the room of your dreams are drawing closer. it's barely two square meters now, walls pressing from all sides. you think you can fit in less.