Where I have been during the last two weeks so that I have not written anything here

It all started when I was skydiving.

I was falling, gliding, floating, drifting peacefully above the Earth. I reveled in feeling the wind against my face, my feet completely free of a ground on which to stand. Right-side-up, upside-down, sideways, backwards--no matter: I was free. The world lay beneath me, unaware of me, uninterested in me, but it was mine to gaze upon--mile after mile after mile after mile. I could see more than any earth-bound human could dream of.

Then suddenly, it was gone. There was a horrible BOOOOM! and then darkness. I stretched my eyes wider, I squinted my eyes harder, searching desperately for some glimmer of light. But there was only blackness. I closed my eyes, because somehow, total darkness is easier to bear with eyes shut. And with my eyes shut, I began to feel nothing. Numbness.

Then I felt a heaviness. I was sitting, my feet planted firmly on a floor, my arms bent and resting on another hard surface, elbows at my sides, fingers fixed to some device. I opened my eyes again and blinked to adjust. There was light, but not the warm, blazing light of the sun. It was instead a cold, cruel, artificial light. I looked around and saw that I was trapped in a small, ugly, windowless room. I was seated in the most uncomfortable chair--my back and legs and shoulders ached from it. I tried to stand, but couldn’t, as I was trapped by a force far stronger than I.

I finally looked down at my hands and noticed that just in front of them, a tiny black rectangle was growing. Larger and larger it grew, as large as my fist, then as large as my head, then as large as my torso, and larger still, until it completely obstructed my view of the plain, ugly walls. All was deadly silent, except for the buzzing lights. I tried to scream, to yell, to cry out, but the heaviness of the ground, the chair, the lights, the air, was crushing my voice.

Twaaaannnngggg. And the rectangle began to glow--first from the center, the light spreading to its bounds and growing brighter and brighter--a phosphorescent glow that made my eyes feel as if they would shrivel up like raisins. I closed my eyes, but the light pierced through my eyelids. I tried to look away, but it was everywhere I turned my head. Again, I tried running away. Again, I was pulled back into the same contorted position.

Just as I had lost all hope of escape and resigned to my fate, trapped in a windowless room, forced to sit eternally and stare at this ever-imposing, glowing phosphorescent rectangle, there appeared upon the rectangle there in front of my eyes, in colossal, black letters

TO DO

It was then that I lost subconsciousness and became a zombie-like creature trapped in an artificial world with TO DO looming over my head.

I had been given a clock. But the clock kept its own slow, tedious time. Minutes that seemed like hours. Hours that seemed like days. Time that served only to prolong my agony. It was the clock that was cruelest of all the things in the terrible, windowless room. It was the clock that held me prisoner. It was the clock that would have kept me forever, if it could.

But when the clock ticked nine hours since I had opened my eyes to find myself there--nine terrible hours; five-hundred forty horrifying minutes; thirty two thousand four-hundred agonizing seconds--it stopped. Its power ceased. Its hold on me was over. The clock had expired before me. I was back in my own world once again, exhausted, defeated, compacted, but free.