Blinding light seared my eyes. I could feel my pupils dilate, filling to the brim with the bright flash that consumed the room. Spot of black lay waste to my vision, I was blinded momentarily but more than that I was blindsided. Even with my bedroom curtains open, the sun was never this bright. Right?

My head swivelled left to right, trying to gain some information of my surroundings, I clearly was not in the comfort of my bed, the hardness under my bum and the firmness of the floor on my bare feet told me that. So where the hell was I? The black spots began to flee, once again giving me my sight back, a sense I didn’t know I would miss so much. Yet I still felt blind. I turnt my gaze down towards my body, I was still in my shorts and t-shirt I had slept with that night but I was not in my bedroom. The walls in my home were a beige colour, filled with paintings and photos of some abstract value that I didn’t appreciate but others did. The walls here, wherever here was, seemed to be just plain brick, damaged by rain from the holes in the tin roof above us. Surely the roof wasn’t tin. Beams of steel, ran from one side of the room to the other, at least 10 from what I could see. Was this the office of a scrapyard manager? A warehouse of some sort? Nothing seemed to lead to an answer only more questions. Grey, battered, concrete flooring was the hardness I felt earlier. Large chunks were missing from the floor, some of the flooring had been left alone holes and all while other parts looked semi- repaired as if someone had tried to fix it but had given up half way through.

The more I looked around the more confused I became. Breathing became difficult as anxiety settled on my chest, preventing my lungs from expanding but also stopping them from deflating, a two pronged attack it seemed. Beads of sweat fell from my forehead, trickled down my face and hit the floor, mimicking the sound of the rain that was crashing through the roof above. I willed my hands to clasp together, and only this made me realise my hands weren’t in front of me, rather they were behind me. Rope wound it’s way around my wrists constricting my movement and that same rope, like a snake had worked it’s way around my torso. How had I missed this when I looked down? Was I still blinded? By the light? No. But surely by my panic, my fear? Or where they simply not there when I looked down? Had I fallen asleep in the moment that has passed between looking down and looking to what surrounded me? Had someone knocked me out? I tried to voice my internal dialogue in efforts to make sense of the discombobulated feelings and thoughts. I couldn’t talk. The taste of fabric suddenly set in as I realised a cloth had been shoved into my mouth to clearly stop me from speaking. So I had to have been kidnapped, right?

Where the hell am I?