I have survived, since I awoke, in conditions of absolute darkness. For how long I cannot say. There have been periods of wakefulness and sleep, that much I can recall, but my memory is not perfect, and I can only count the days as fragile things, unable to be grasped for very long before falling apart.

Perhaps it is better to recount the physical conditions of my predicament. I have, as far as I can tell, am trapped in a space that is infinitely narrow yet infinitely long. Paradoxically, it has seemed to be growing smaller by the day; why I am still alive despite this case might be attributed to the surprisingly pliant nature of my prison, which will admit any manner of movement as I struggle against it -- especially as I did in the early days of my confinement -- only to spring back into its original shape in a manner no more comfortable than before. As a sole consolation the prison's monotony is abated in the fact that it is not consistently straight. I have attempted to escape many a time, only to find what I believed was a discontinuity in the prison was in fact a bend into another section, which again folds back into itself, as far as I can tell, ad infinitum. The prison thus provides promises of hope in very small increments, that all the more sour its induced despair yet not towards the extent of my utter resignation: it is a very ingenuously crafted labyrinth, and I cannot imagine a trap better than it, were I sadistic enough to be the designer of my own demise, or if indeed I could remember anything else to compare it to.

Another reason for my survival lies in the fact that I have not starved at the hands of my unseen jailor. Yet this too is a cruel mercy, for what must be ingested to survive -- if indeed, it arrives at all -- flows in drips and drops from a place forever in the bend behind me, putrid sour-tasting gruel which I swiftly discovered was the only thing I had to consume between bouts of writhing, self-rending hunger. At times I have tried to run from it in search of better nourishment, else squirm back towards its source to discover an exit, but the origin and condition of the nourishment does not change, only becoming more putrid with every single one of my physical protests. This was, again, more common in the early days of my condition. Now, I can barely taste the sourness at all. I fear, as unknown weeks have dragged on, that I have even begun to enjoy it.

My jailor, ever wiser than I, must have timed this stage of my condition with such exquisite exactitude that I have once suspected I was the express prisoner of the omnipotent Almighty itself. These days I find myself slipping away with each cycle of sleep and wakefulness. Perhaps it has not been weeks but years or even decades since my imprisonment, and I am lapsing into the final stage of my mortal life. Or perhaps I was already dying -- or worse, already dead -- and waiting to pass on, whiling out my days in my subterranean purgatory. Instead I am learning that non-existence can be far more tormentful in the land of perfect pain. Conditions I had long grown used to suddenly become unbearable as if I was opening my senses anew, and pains I had long forgot soon resurfaced with every episode of oblivion. As my body and mind grows ever smaller, so does the prison seem to shrink around me. One day there will be nothing left for me to feel -- there is nothing left of me to feel -- and the prison itself will shrink to the size of a speck no bigger than I am. Perhaps only then, when the last of my jailor has wasted away with me, will I think I know pity; only then will I know peace.