I don’t know where I am or how long I’ve been here. I tried to count it out at the beginning, tried to chart the passage of time, but I eventually lost track. The only thing I know is that it can’t possibly be days any more. It must be weeks. A fortnight. In my most unguarded moments, I even start to worry it might be worse than that.

What if it’s been a month?

What if it’s been two?

When I woke up here the first time, I no longer had a phone on me. My watch and bank cards had been taken as well. It didn’t register with me at first that the clothes and the shoes that I was wearing weren’t mine – that they were different; that I’d been changed into someone else’s property while I’d been unconscious. But after my voice started to become hoarse from constantly shouting for help, it hit home how uncomfortably tight my shoes were, and how badly the clothes fitted. When I touched them, I realized I was wearing a pair of trainers, not the boots that actually belonged to me. I had on tracksuit trousers, not jeans; a hooded top, not a sweater and a T-shirt. Everything I was wearing smelled of mildew and felt old.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve got to my feet and, in order to keep warm, tried to build some sort of picture of this room in my head, using my hands to touch and my steps to pace it out. At the start, I would do it often, sometimes consecutively, one exploration after the next, trying to recreate the same route in order to map everything out. But there’s no furniture in here, nothing to even bump into. There are no landmarks. I know there must be a way in and a way out because food is left for me in the same place every day, on a paper plate, alongside a bottle of water, but I can’t feel any doors. I can’t feel the ridges of a frame anywhere. I hear no breeze escaping in, and see no chink of light – not even a single, solitary pinprick.

There’s just blackness.

When I first found the food and water, I didn’t eat and drink any of it, wary of what I might be taking down. Now, though, I’m less fussy and I try not to think too hard about it. I accept the clothes and the blanket that have been left for me because, if I didn’t, it would be even worse than this. I’d be weak. I’d be sick.

Or I’d already be dead.