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the-woman-in-the-writing · 5 years

Text

“Breakdown No. 42″ a short story

Rating: PG TRIGGER WARNING Word Count: 1,325

Author’s note:

This is my most honest work (yet). I wrote this for a book compilation that revolves around emotions and experiences. The truth is, I didn’t know what to write because the compilation required us to be honest about ourselves, and in my years as a writer I always do my best to refrain from reflecting myself in my work, specifically prose (I’m quite honest with my poetry). I wanted to write about someone or something that isn’t me. There may be pieces of myself scattered in my literature but it’s not fully about or inspired by me. So, writing this gave me a whole new direction in writing; every minute was torture, I have to admit. But after I’ve finished it and had a few of my close friends and relatives read it, they cried and told me, ‘this is your best work so far’. I hope you, reader, see it as that way too and if not, I hope you feel you’re not alone in whatever you’re going through.

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

My yellow walls swelled. Those ugly, piss-yellow walls that were supposed to remind me of happiness. I hated them. Sometimes, they would speak to me. In whispers. In mumbling. In chants. The message was all the same: you don’t belong here. But tonight, they were quiet and maybe it was because my thoughts are too loud to interpret something from their silence. I could hear the air-condition hum a lullaby for the sleepless – a nursery rhyme for the lost.

My hands feel warm on my ears as I feel it tremble. Blood rushing – I could hear it rumble, rumble, rumble. My fingers intertwine itself with my hair and my nails dig into my skull, trying to grab the person inside me. The voice that tells me what to do and what I think. The soul that sympathizes and loathes other people. I want her out – you don’t belong here. Out.

My walls just keep on swelling and swelling and swelling, suffocating me. I have never been claustrophobic, but my room is terrifyingly small right now, like those trap rooms where the walls are closing in on you. I know it’s all in my head. When I stand up, my head won’t hit the ceiling and I can still stretch my arms to show how much I want to leave. It’s all in my head.

It’s all in my head.

I sat up, facing the window. It was night and who knows what time it is, but the outside world seems so peaceful and still, like a painting. My breath fogs up the glass and moistens my nose. I don’t know what to do. It’s a bad day today. I feel so trapped. I am a butterfly trapped in a bell jar and I want out. Nothing bad happened, to be honest. Today went by perfectly normal. It’s just… It’s a bad day. There’s a looming sadness inside of myself and I can feel it spilling out of me, dripping through my nose and the corners of my lips, mixing with my tears, and coming out of my ears and my pores. It’s spilling and spilling – it’s all in my head – and I’m trying to keep it inside of me.

I feel so lost, like I’m floating in oblivion, never anchored down to anything. There’s no sense of belongingness in reality and imagination. I’m stuck in the middle. I am a tourist taking a walk in the Museum of Everyone. The place is silent and deserted, boxed with mahogany walls and films of dusts. There’re different rooms to see: The Hall of Deaths, the Human Mind Planetarium, the Lives Gallery. Wax figures and metal description plates. Mother and Father having breakfast with kids. Teacher lectures about parts of the cell. Friends laughing around. Girl kisses Boy for the first time.

I don’t feel like I belong here, or even anywhere.

A shadow of myself steps out of me. She still has that hope in her eyes, but I could see she’s tired. She looks at me with a blank face and says, “You need to leave.” And she walks out of the door and when I look back to the window, she’s outside, looking at me and shaking her head. It felt strange to watch myself. It was like watching a movie or dreaming; I am in a doppelganger film and I’m the double trying to take over the original’s life.

The walls started swelling again. I try to push them back but it’s no use. You don’t belong here.

Leaving was easier than I expected; I just had to stand up and open the door. In the corner of my eye, I see my dad’s journal look at me earnestly, so I pick it up before the walls could crush me. The outside looks so still from inside, but it’s just like my room. Swelling and crushing me. But outside, my room looks normal. It was all in my head. It’s just a bad day. I imagine it being sucked by a small blackhole, leaving an empty space in our house.

Then I started walking. And walking. And walking. There’s no destination in mind, but I want to be as far away as possible from my life and I want to find myself. I am an observer in the Hall of Changes. I looked at the houses and I remember what color they had before they chipped away. Those bubbles of paint that were so entertaining to squish. I looked at the streets and I remember how it wasn’t paved that way back then. The way it was so muddy whenever it rained. I looked at the walls and I remember the vandals that have come and gone through the years. The “I love you’s” and “was here’s”. I looked at my life and I remember how simple it was before. The colors, the design, and the words. Now, everything inside of me is twisted and tangled, so complex and so hard to fix and understand.

I could feel the breath of the surroundings, caressing my arms like someone is pulling me slowly into an embrace. I close my eyes and breathe along. Life is entering and leaving my body. I’ve always been alive, one way or another, but so are the sick, so are the sleeping.

My existence feels so linear. Predictable. Dull. An endless string of ‘and then, and then, and then…’. Is there nothing left for me? Do I just go to college, get a degree that I’m never going to use, get my first job that I’m going to hate eventually, pay my taxes, buy a place, quit my first job, get a second job, get married, have kids, buy a house, have a midlife crisis, deal with my children’s teen angst, send them to college so they’ll get a degree they’ll never use so they could get their first job – Is there nothing left? Is this… everything that’s left for me?

How could anyone call this a life?

I had stopped walking. I’m already someplace else with a stranger’s house in front of me. In there, a family or someone who is alone is sleeping, dreaming away their life as they wait for another tomorrow to waste. What would’ve been my life if I had grown up inside that house? Would I have been sad? Would today have been a bad day?

I sat on the pavement and looked at the starless sky, imagining the world revolving and rotating around the sun as I moved on with life. Heliocentric. Then I imagined it revolving and rotating as I sat there at that pavement, motionless. Anthropocentric.

My dad’s journal beat inside my hand. It was old. The edges were soft. Some pages fell out. My dad had wrapped the cover with masking tape and was now brownish. A quote was written on it. Inside, I found poems, entries, quotes, lyrics, unfinished sketches, and pictures. There were some written for my mom. There were some written for himself. And there were some written for me. Opening and skimming the journal felt like I was the exhibit being observed, rather than being the observer. The Lives Gallery. Girl finds herself. I read everything twice and I cried.

She is our sunshine, and I love her.

I imagined myself as a toddler, big eyes with a stupid smile, carried in my parents’ arms. Everything felt in place and was the size of a snow globe. I am inside. You belong here. Girl grows up. I had the world ahead of me. I just didn’t know it yet.

I looked up once more and the world and the sun revolved and rotated around me again before I closed the journal and started walking home.

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