Boxed In: Nothingness

We both jumped to our feet. Instinctively, I reached for his hand. It had been so long since we had touched, I considered pulling away immediately. But he grasped it with fierce protectiveness and my heart skipped a beat at the memory his touch stirred. He once had been my safe place, long ago. I needed that now.

Together we spun in a circle, taking in our strange surroundings. There was nothing, less than nothing, to see. It was all just white with no distinction between sky, floor, or walls.

Several minutes passed, or no time at all, it was hard to say. But nothing changed. We saw no sign of anyone or anything else and finally found our voices.

"How? Where are we?" I tried to keep the panic at bay.

"I told you not to open that box!" Ryan muttered under his breath.

His hand no longer whispered of forgotten comfort; I pulled away from him. "Of course, it's my fault."

"Well..." He shrugged.

"You're the one with the fabulous pocket knife that you were all too happy to use. If you wanted to stop me, you sure chose a strange way to do it."

We spent several minutes blaming each other, before the finger pointing inevitably devolved into our default bitter silence. It was more than I could bear so I turned away from him and started to storm off.

"Kayla, where are you going?" He shouted at my back.

"I'm not just going to sit around here listening to you tell me everything's my fault all day and wait for some psycho to come and kill us or experiment on us or whatever. I'm going to go find a way out of here."

"Okay, but where do you think you're going?" His voice was annoyingly condescending.

"I don't know. Every direction looks exactly the same so this way seems as good as any." I turned around, shaking my head.

"That's my point," He threw his arms in the air dramatically. "Everything looks the same. You'll have no way of knowing if you're walking in a straight line or in circles. We need a plan."

I rolled my eyes, "And I suppose you have a better idea, like always?"

"Well, we need to make sure we can tell where we've been and which direction we're going." He sighed. "But, I have no idea how we are going to do that."

Despite my reluctance to agree with him, I knew he was right. Then I had a brilliant thought. I rummaged through my purse, retrieved a tube of bright crimson lipstick, and used it to draw an arrow on the ground. We walked in as straight a line as we could until the arrow was barely visible behind us then I drew another bright red arrow. We continued walking and drawing arrows, mostly in silence, for hours. Finally we noticed something that wasn't white ahead of us. Excitedly we started running, until we realized what we were running toward was a red arrow drawn on the ground.

"How is this possible?" Ryan yelled. "We've just walked in a giant circle!"

After several minutes of cursing we decided to try another direction. I drew a one at the bottom of the first arrow then drew another arrow crossing the first with a two below it. Then we headed out in the new direction. Rather than the silence we walked in before, Ryan filled the time with an angry rant. He wasn't ranting at me, just near me, yet every word cut away at my hope for escape. Finally, I could take it no more and angrily and very sarcastically apologized for getting him stuck here. From there the arguing escalated. Pretty soon we were back to blaming each other for everything. Then we saw in the distance the one thing that could shut both of us up. Two red arrows on the ground crossing each other.

"Nooooo!" He shouted, falling to his knees, his shoulders sagging with defeat. "We've been walking for hours and we're right back where we started. How are we ever going to find a way out of here?"

I couldn't answer; I was too busy crying tears of frustration. I buried my head in my hands and sobbed.

Then I felt something completely unexpected.

Ryan's strong arms wrapped around me in a way he had not held me in so long I almost forgot what it felt like.

With absolute confidence he told me, "We're going to figure this out and we're going to do it together." Despite everything, in that moment, I felt safe in his embrace.

I wiped my eyes and nodded resolutely. Then I noticed something over Ryan's shoulder. "Look!" I pointed. "That was not there a minute ago!"

I grabbed his hand, intertwining my fingers with his, and led him to the spot only a dozen paces away. There a faint outline made a perfect rectangle in the middle of the white nothingness. I pushed softly in the center of the outline and a flap easily fell open, revealing a doorway. Ryan squeezed my hand encouragingly and together we stepped through.

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