[ WP ] You wake up one day in a room with four walls made of glass . Surrounding yo are hundreds of other people stuck in their own rooms .

It's hard to overstate, impossible even, the absolute madness a mind can drive itself to questioning if this really is real. I'd known it a few times before, that madness - when I first developed tinnitus, the first few panic attacks before I'd met Anna, the manic spiral after she passed. Trying to tell anybody about it... like smoke through hands. It's what I felt when I woke up. Can you feel it? 
 
 I cried for hours, screamed for more, cried and screamed until I thought I could kill myself by doing it. I woke up with chapped lips and a sore throat, and then I started to see. I saw them before, the rooms adjacent, above, below, I must have, I remember them watching me, the pity, the knocking, the clouds of red amplified and muddied in a million iterations of glass... but I only really saw them after I woke. Can you believe that? To see and not to see? I spend a day crying and screaming and never noticed that there were several wonderful people just a single wall away. Can you believe that I regret it now, those however many hours in embarrassing agony? It has been an eternity of horror and I still regret those hours. Oh my, if Anna heard that... 
 
 One was quite a beauty, she had the prettiest pitying eyes I'd ever see, and I hated pity. I felt guilty - three of them around me had livened, joyed almost when I woke up, I could see what looked like happiness on their faces, and I went to the pretty one, old cotter I am. BONJOUR, read the penciled print on white paper she had pressed up against the glass separating our hells, JE SUIS DESOLEE. I knew some French. Hello, it said, I am sorry. 
 
 I began to see, to really see, and when I say that I mean not at all. I saw the identical desks in each of our rooms, the kept and unkept beds. Glass, everywhere, above, below, around, glass that gave way to the same shapes and colors, the brown of the wood of the furniture and the red, the red, yes, it must have been red, I thought, the bloody red and black that stained the floors, the ceilings, the walls. It was everywhere but nowhere in particular, a red blackened by time and hazied by a thousand panes of glass, red as far as you wanted to see. I wish I could make you see, I'm sorry, but the insanity of it... I fell into another hysterical fit, woke up sometime later. My French friend was sleeping in that pale fluorescent desklight and I looked up and there was red again, not black or muddy but bright red and spilled by the woman who looked down on me from the ceiling, she had orange hair I could see, I would n't dare call it red, and she had pulverized her skull into the very glass above me, the white of her skull almost a blessing, I looked at her for a while, me screaming like a fool the whole time, her eyes open in death. There were a few moments when I thought `` What did I do, God, please, I do n't ask for You to take me back, just tell me why I am here.'' He did n't answer and I only took solace in the fact that I knew for certain Anna was not here. 
 
 I came to know Genevieve, my French neighbor, better. We taught each other our languages. Well, she taught me French - she had been taught English by the man below her, but all I saw in his room was a pool of red. Do you know the infinite sadness a person can hold in their eyes? I grew up reading about eyes, about the things they can express, and I never believed a word of it. Anna's eyes flashed love every once in a while, disappointment too many times to admit, even still, eight years in this hell. But Genevieve made me Believe in eyes. In hers I just saw sadness, an eternal grief, a soothing blue in a sea of red. I cursed God, knowing full well that he was alive and heinously spiteful, for putting such a willing, gentle bearer of sadness down here. I can ’ t make you understand, but good God do I wish I could, that there is only a certain level of despair that two blue eyes can bear! It is enormous, but it is finite. I do n't blame Genevieve at all. 
 
 One woman next to me had died and blackened long ago, long before I arrived, from what I can tell. One man was alive, I could see, a mass under sheets, but that's all he ever was, a frightened fetus in the all-seeing hell of glass. The final room next to me contained a strong young Asian man who trained his body every day. I now wish I had trained mine in my youth. In my many attempts to kill myself over the years here, I fail almost completely because I am not strong enough to lift a corner of the bed above my head, or manage enough force to dash my skull over the glass. My room is the messy red of failure, and the grim Asian looks at me with disdain. I can not read his characters and he can not read mine, and he does not want to. 
 I can not make you feel this, though I wish I could, the terror that is every atom in every space in every second of the endless panes of glass. The terror of the red-black horizon. The terror of the words on the pages. The terror of infinity. WHY CANT YOU KNOW IT I NEED YOU TO KNOW IT, words I have scrawled on infinite pages to cover of the blood of my failure. The sadness of my heart. The corpse of the woman above me whose eyes watch me waste and fail. Genevieve, who did me the courtesy of dying turned away, a deed my heart has infinite gratitude for. Oh, Genevieve, oh, Anna. 

