Meandering Minds - Ming edition Solo

The Waiting Room

It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I thought it might be. The room was small, but efficiently compact. Cozy, even. Different from what I'd expected, but not bad. I liked how thought-out the place was. There wasn’t an inch of space wasted. The room was everything it needed to be. And best of all, there would be was no one else here who would annoy me. I sat, taking out the watch I’d snuck in and placed it beside me.
All I had to do was to kill some time. It wasn’t that hard.
It might even be fun.

Tick, tick, tick.

The ticking on the watch was like the crack of thunder against the backdrop of silence. The repetition was welcoming, soothing even. A reassuring metronome that was the backdrop for my musings. I’d lost track of the time here, being buried in the depths of my own thoughts. It couldn’t have been long. I glanced at my watch, and knew I was right. It was much too early. I needed to spend more time here. Quite a bit more time.
So, I decided to explore the room.
Every room has stories to tell: scratches and markings, through which ghosts of people long since gone could reach back to tell snippets of their lives to those who cared enough to listen. Finding those scratches and making sense of them was a lot of work. But I had all the time in the world.

Tik, tik, tik.

How long had I been there? Hours? Days? Did I even want to know? I looked around the room. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d looked up. Or the hundred times before that, for that matter. Yet, everything had changed.
Maybe it was boredom. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me, and I was just imagining it. Maybe I was thinking too much.
Whatever the reason, the room was different. It wasn’t welcoming, but sinister, and wrong.
I hate this room, and it felt like the room hated me right back.

Tch.

The lights flickered jarringly, straining my eyes when I tried to look around. Not looking was worse, though. The cracks over the walls, like so many spidery fingers, reached for me from obscure corners of my vision. The walls themselves felt like they closed in on me. My demons sprang to life, staying out of sight but whispering to me. Always whispering. Always scheming. Always just out of sight.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst thing was the watch. I couldn’t find the wretched thing, or I would have broken it already. It rang continuously, like an evil impish laugh, echoing mercilessly against the walls. It kept me up at night, and haunted my day and my nightmares as well. The ringing drew my attention to everything wrong with this room. The ringing intruded on the little personal space I had built in this strange room that had no one in it but me.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

I could only wait out the time I had remaining here.

Tik-tik. Tik-tik. Tik-tik.