Time loses its meaning so easily when you're alone. In the dark, all minutes drag like hours.

Everything passes but the pain. You don't learn to keep yourself calm; you exhaust yourself beyond caring. You regain consciousness, and the cold sweats hit. Your heart sinks, aches against your ribcage, and it mounts from there, panic rises, your heart races, you struggle, you do not budge, blood courses through your veins, new topologies of pain reveal themselves across your beaten body--and there is no climax, no release, no relief. When panic takes such tight hold of you, you expect its highest peak to snap something inside you, kill you, shut you down, but none of that happens. There is no respite, there never will be, and if you don't take hold of it, it’ll keep going until the end; until your mind is so strained, and your body so exhausted, that this state of half-being becomes your new normal. The adrenaline fades from your bloodstream. You grow numb and alone with the pain, aware of the wood's creaks under the weight of six feet of earth, aware of the vacuum you have been plunged into, and you wait. You wait for the air to run out.

Pray for freedom. Scratch at the lid; wood is stronger than flesh or bone. Claw at it, become beast, bleed, become wretch, strike at it, work yourself up, inhale the thinning air, smell blood, smell dirt, throw yourself at the boundary between life and death, disintegrate. Pray for sleep. Hold your body to the grindstone and hope that shock and blood loss beats suffocation to the punch.

It won't. You know it won't. Only those who buried you here can save you, and they're gone, they have taken their grieving home, where it's comfortable, where it's warm and safe from rain.

Your entire body rebels. It shouts at you, in the language of pain and panic, to remove yourself from this danger no matter the cost. Your survival instincts do not understand the six feet of earth that loom above. Their hope is a joke; you'd laugh if your lungs hadn't collapsed.

Everything loses meaning when you're alone. In the dark, there is only waiting.