When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing.
Alexander Gordon SmithThe human mind is a powerful thing in many ways, but in others it's endlessly fragileโit takes only a single moment of pure terror to tear a hole in it, like a finger through a cobweb, leaving you forever just a shadow, a half-person.
Alexander Gordon SmithSomething in my gut twisted so hard that it felt like I was being tickled by an invisible hand, and it took me a moment to realize what it was. Hope. It had been so long since I'd felt it that the sensation was like something living inside me, something wonderful waiting to break free, just like I was.
Alexander Gordon SmithI'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedomโone from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.
Alexander Gordon Smith