It’s not impossible to live in the well.
When I fell in, a naive child committing the apparently unforgivable sin of not looking where I was going, I hit cold water and was certain, dead certain, that I was going to drown. I’d been wrong, as children often are. It’s an old well, the bricks cracked and fallen in in many places, and back when the water was higher it had washed away a lot of the dirt behind the bricks, creating a little hollow where it’s possible to sit, or even lie down, above the surface of the water. I’d dragged myself up and shivered myself dry and, to my surprise, survived.
After that, I’d been certain that I would be rescued. But I’d been wrong about that, too. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, and the entrance to the well is overgrown and hidden; if they looked, they probably looked in the wrong places. And they would’ve given up by now. It’s been such a long time.
It’s not so bad. There’s clean water down here, and the fungus and ivy that grows even this far down is edible. Sometimes something else edible falls in the well, a rare boon. So long as I’m careful to conserve my energy, I can scrape together enough to live down here – and my little hollow of dirt (I’ve tried making it bigger, it’s impossible, there’s nothing but stone behind it) isn’t big enough to do more than sit or lie down anyway, so I don’t have to waste energy on exercise. There’s more than just the bare necessities down here, too; I also get the glorious luxury of sunlight. In the winter, I get almost thirty minutes of direct sunlight per day as the sun passes overhead, although I often have to lean into the rain to touch it. And in the summer, almost two full hours of light a day. It’s beautiful. You learn to see the beauty in light on water, when you live in a well.
But the best feature of the well, easily, absolutely no contest, is the rope.
It’s old and rough and about as thick as my wrist. It hangs from the distant light above, anchored somewhere outside the well, I think, and reaches almost to the water below me. I’ve tried to scale the bricks enough times to be absolutely certain that that rope is the only way out of the well. Sometimes I like to hold it in my hands, feel the rough bite under the slime, and dream of where it could take me, dream of hauling myself up and out into a world of endless sunlight and cooked food and warm beds and standing room and loving family. A wonderful heaven glimpsed in the fuzzy circle of light at the top of my world and the hazy memories in the back of my mind. I am so, so lucky to have this rope, the greatest treasure of my world; a way out of it.
I’ve never actually tried to climb the rope, of course. It’s old, it’s rotten, there are frayed and frail patches high above. I think there’s about a fifty per cent chance it could take my weight and lift me out, and a fifty per cent chance that it would break and drop me once again into the waters below. I’m not worried about that; I fall into the water sometimes, it’s no big deal. It’s easy to climb back onto my ledge. I’m not scared of a drop.
I’m scared of losing the rope.
If I try to leave and the rope breaks, I’ll have no way to leave. I’d be stuck in a well with no rope out. And that would be intolerable. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth the risk of losing the rope. It’s better to just stay here than to risk losing the way out.
If I climb the rope and it breaks, I’ll be trapped forever in the well. I don’t think I could live with being trapped forever in a well. Better to stay here than to risk that. Better to collect my water and scrape mushrooms off the wall for dinner and run the rope through my hands very, very carefully, so as not to break it. It’s fine here in the well.
It’s not impossible to live in the well.
Derin Edala 