CW // Suicide
He knows what he did to end up 36,000 feet below sea level. He knows that outside these sealed walls there is 14.7 pounds per square inch of water pressure which would crush him like a tin can if he were to leave. If he could leave. He knows these things, because they were told to him with eager relish at his sentencing. He knows that twenty feet to either side of him there are other prisoners in identical cells but he’ll never know their names or see their faces.
But what he doesn’t know is how long he can bear to listen to nothing but the ragged breaths of the mechanical rebreather and the ever-present hum of a distant reactor. He doesn’t know what the food that barrels down those pipes each morning and each evening is doing to his body. He doesn’t know at what point in his sentence he will try to kill himself.
But he knows he will. No one has ever lasted the full twenty five.
Paddy Dobson
6th May 2022