The Cell – Example Descriptive Writing

A short, sharp, blinding ray of light flashed into sight. The fleetingly short glimpse of light was immensely painful to my eyes. It seemed so long that I had actually seen anything that sight had become almost a distant memory to me. For such a great period of time I had longed to see something. Although my need for visual stimulation was becoming tedious, it was nothing in comparison to my hunger. My desperation for nourishment was increasing by the hour, and the occasional smell of bacon sandwiches from what I assumed was the next room acted as a constant reminder of my hellish and seemingly unjustified torture. Although the smell of food did cause me great anxiety, in some way it acted as a reprieve from the foul stench that encapsulated the room in which I at times thought I might die. The smell was an unpleasant mixture of urine, sweat, and what I can only describe as pain. The smell of pain was something that in all my years I had never smelt before, and is undoubtedly an odour that I under no circumstances wish to be subjected to again. At first, I could not quite put my finger on what that smell was but the tedium and boredom that I was suffering from resulted in me spending many dreary hours racking my brains trying to identify it. As the days passed and my conditions and morale worsened, I began to slowly figure out what it was, until at what was quite possibly one of my lowest points, I finally diagnosed it as pain. The smell of pain has no precise definition, but if you have even been in this type of situation, the stench is unmistakable.

After what seemed like an age, my severe mental anguish became utterly unbearable. My agony and torture was like the black sea, and in it, I was drowning., The distant murmur of talking and the occasional muffled fit of laughter added to my deepening feeling of isolation. It had been so long since I had even spoken to a person, let alone seen one. My throat felt so tight due to me being restricted to a small glass of foul smelling water a day, that I was beginning to believe that I would be unable to talk. I often doubted that the water I was given really was water, thinking that my capturers may be playing an awful trick on me and making me drink their bodily waste, but my seemingly unquenchable thirst meant that I would simply have to drink it or run the risk of dehydration.

As my torment continued, the risk of dehydration was becoming an ever increasingly more favourable option. At times, I pondered on whether it would be better to just give up on myself, but whenever this demon like though crept into my head, I forced myself into not giving up hope; if not for my sake, then for the sake of my beloved family. I seldom thought of my family. It was not that I was being self-centred or because I did not love them. I tired not to think f them because it caused me such great pain.

Every night or when I was tired, I would force myself to sleep. Sleep was one of the few activities that I enjoyed, merely because my dreams were far better than reality. Within my own dreamland, the torture and pain that haunted me during my waking hours were virtually non-existent. I was able to do whatever I wished in my dreamland, but it was when I was in my sanity protecting wilderness that the next chapter of my hellish encounter with evil unfolded.

In what seemed like a matter of seconds, I was brutally bundled out of my cell and pushed into a vehicle. The vehicle felt damp and smelt of rusty mould, and there was an extremely uneasy atmosphere within the vehicle that heightened my anxiety. I waited. The door was still open, allowing me to finally take a deep breath of fresh air. The air was like no air I had ever breathed before. It was vibrant and rejuvenating. It tasted sweet, but the ecstasy of this was extremely short-lived. Before I even realised that I would have been able to see had I opened my eyes, my head was twisted and pulled violently, a blindfold was positioned over my squinting eyes, and my previously muscular but now emaciated arms were tied behind my back. The pain in my neck following this violent onslaught was unbearable. The door was slammed and I heard the awkward churn of the obviously aging car being locked. Once again I was alone. Isolated. The stench within the car was almost as foul as the smell within the confines of my cell. My desperation was escalating by the second, and time seemed to have halted to a complete standstill. There was no sound, I could not see, I could hardly breathe because of the putrid smell inside the car, and I had hardly eaten in what seemed like months; it seemed as though my senses had ripped away from me and discarded along with the rest of my now pathetic and meaningless life. I was completely drained, and although I was slightly pleased to have been removed my cell, I was angry at whomever ha subjected me to such inhumane torture. What kind of a person could, for no apparent reason, do to somebody what had been done to me? My whole life had been snatched away from me, and quite possibly the lives of my family destroyed in the process. My thoughts were driving me insane, but I could not remove them from my mind. All I had been able to do during my captured time was think, and now, even my thoughts were turning against me. My whole life was a mess, but I refused to relinquish my loosening grip on reality, and perhaps most importantly – hope. Hope was all that was left in my pitiful excuse for a life. But as long as there is hope, there is a way out.

Gunshots sounded, effortlessly awakening me from a deep and much needed sleep prematurely. The echo of the shots rang in my ears. For so long had I wished for sound and yet now, ironically, I yearned for nothing more than for them to stop. They didn’t. For what seemed like an eternity the gunshots continued. Panic surged through and took hold of my body leaving me motionless, as if I was paralysed. My blindfold slipped off, and although I could finally see, all I was able to o was stare. I stared blankly at inanimate objects for an age until slowly my consciousness evaporated and I drifted away.