There’s a kind of slow crumbling, where pieces of a life are snipped off, like the limbs of a bonsai by an overzealous gardener. Where the world turns to city, from city to street, street to house, and finally, house to room. The sky and moon, the rain and the warmth of sunlight on the skin are lost. All that’s left are four walls, cobwebs and books that grow dusty without a will to read.

A nightmare, life in death, takes people, locks them away. Where they can only scrape at the walls of their prison with bloody fingernails, slowly going mad from isolation.

It’s no one disease, pathogen or ailment, nothing that can be cured with just a pill. For some, they die there alone, a lucky few though, can learn the walls of their prison so well, that like Dantès, they can find a secret way out.

Just a breath of fresh air, or the scent of a flower can overwhelm, each step must be taken gingerly. The prison becomes again what it was, a sanctuary, somewhere to rest before the next adventure outside.