To Exist

Oh no, the faucet's left me running

               It's 3:14AM when she wakes up to the flickering bathroom light. The water is still running, and she's long since gotten pruney. It's happened again. She needs to stop.

She trudges to the bedroom, still dripping, but too exhausted to function. She knows that she promised herself that she would finish the work that night, but it's already 3:15 and she can't help but wonder what it would be like to be free of responsibility. She imagines herself flourishing in such a world.

Instead, she goes to sleep.

She dreams of chapped lips and wet books. She sees her dead uncle sitting among the books, trying to swim away, but books are not water and he sinks. She laughs, and laughs, and wants to stop laughing but the retinas of his eyes are burnt and it's hilarious. He falls. He's bones and ash. She wants to throw up.

She wakes to the ticking of a clock. No, she wakes to silence. As her mind rots back into cognizance, she hears the sound of her AC dripping water.

"Okay," she thinks.

She leaves her room and does not (or tries not to) think about it. (She is unsuccessful. She imagines a flood. She imagines drowning.

"Okay," she thinks.)

It's 6:00AM. Or 5:00PM. She can't tell anymore. All she knows is that time is running, trying its best to evade her, a menace, a horror.

She can't breathe.

Okay.

She wonders if she can sleep. If it's time yet. She goes into the bathroom and strips. She stares at her naked reflection and wonders at her lack of insecurities. Should she be insecure? She knows that every blemish on her body can be covered up if need be. She knows that her only missing limb was intangible in the first place - people may think that she is lazy, stupid, lax, but she knows that their ableism is a privilege.

How can they say that she is able and lazy when she cannot even bring herself to exist without the fear of nonexistence? She rots in her own privilege, so different from theirs; her privilege, if anything, is her own oppressor.

She falls asleep in the shower again. She cannot breathe. She's drowning. She's asleep and her baba is dead and she just wants to crumple. But breakdowns, nervous or not, have no room on her agenda. She is a busy girl in a world too preoccupied to notice that she needs time to just exist.

She does not smile.

"Okay," she thinks, and that is that.