Tick-tock. Was that even a real clock? Nope, simply my mind. Tock-to the tick- to the click- to the tock… what was going on?! My mind was running and racing in abnormal ways- was I hallucinating? Oh my GOD! It’s so agonizing; repeating the same actions over and over and over again. Well it’s been too long, way too long since I entered this damn place. I don’t know what day, time or date it is because I can barely move around enough to face a clock or calendar. Every passing minute feels like another year, and only God knows if I actually have been here for years’ worth of time.
Despite that, I can still say that it has been too long since I’ve been trapped and isolated in this depressing book. Every different book I enter has a different time; a different scenario. It’s a struggle to keep up with how many books I’ve travelled to in total so I gave up with counting, but I know it is still not enough. I’m not experienced enough yet. Okay… let’s not complicate things and talk about this ‘experience’ thing just now, oh that will have to wait.
Standing here, feeling the weight of my body collapse onto my shrivelled, destroyed legs, my jaws struggled to maintain the plastered smile itching across my face. It felt like my body was completely detached from my soul and I was…lucid dreaming. I could see myself standing… or limping on the spot as if I was a complete different person. The pain of the standing, mere standing really took its toll on my brain. But that is all for one reason: this book.
This particular book has to be the worst, most boring book I’ve ever been in- the same old carnivals screaming and sounding in the corner, a fat old man trying his luck to find a buyer as well as the other fine women who spends her time trying to impress. Whilst one might say that a carnivals is hands down the most exciting thing you can go to, but no. This is definitely the most boring, claustrophobic book I’ve been in.
My luck got me stuck as a shop owner behind a ventriloquist shop, waiting. That’s all I ever do; that’s everything I hate. Waiting. And not unless someone turns the page of this flipping book, I will be stuck here. All alone. Doing the same thing, doing nothing.
The place gives me the creeps to say the least, truth be told it’s nothing I haven’t gotten used to. I’m bored. And no- not the typical ‘I’m bored, I have nothing to do let me just invite my friends over’- no! I’m bored. I have nothing to do. I have no friends to invite over, scratch that, I’m not even allowed to move! Imagine what it’s like to have spiders constantly creeping, trembling slowly using their long, fragile legs to tickle you in a sickening way and keep going higher, higher until you can feel the hair on their bodies brush swiftly past your neck as it stops, staring eight folds down on you like a king as it continues to creep higher and higher till it has nowhere else to go, and it repeats the journey all over again. Now imagine you’re in that situation and you can’t move.
So what do you do when you’re bored and can’t even move? You make fun. Over the last, couple of days or months or whatever you call it, I’ve been entertaining myself by counting how much hair I have on my head, or how much of it I can actually see. Trouble is I don’t know how to count past 486,000 so I gave up and counted the split ends on my hair instead. It was quite interesting actually, how jungle-like your hair can look uncombed. For me, it was all tangled and looked like a house in a tree so I made a story out of that. Yet there’s only so much you can take from counting hair and after that I ran out of ides. So I spoke to myself, explaining my life story to myself.
Dust and cobwebs embroidered every crook and curve of the narrow, depressing joy-grave; I always dreaded being a shop owner, especially because of the fact that it was so motionless.That wasn’t who I am! And what’s worse? It was so far out of my reach. No matter how badly I wanted it, it was too much of a risk to move out of my place. It was so close but much too far.
The necklace.
