Sonder

Recurring Hell

  The air curls around her throat, and invisible spikes pokes into her flesh. The room seem to slide out of place, oddly spinning back and forth ever so slightly. The adolescent girl claws into her scalp, and tucks her head into her body. She desperately struggled to breathe, her small back rising up and down a few hundred times per minute. Tears and snot runs down like waterfall as a looming sense of death starts to drape itself around her.

  The third panic attack for the day.

  At her side, a pen knife with half of its blade used sits in eerie silence. Rectangular pieces of cardboard strewn about the room, a half completed model of a building helplessly on its side at the other side of the room. The air was stuffy, the sky outside completely enveloped in darkness. The night is at its peak, as silent as a dead body. The only sound to be heard is the constant gush of cold wind coming from the air conditioner.

  The girl, her greasy hair messily tied together, raised her face. Though her breathing is still rough, she has gained back some control; the grip around her throat has finally loosened after an unbearable eternity. Her hand launched forward, grabbing tissues in a rushed, sloppy manner. The tissue box tumbled down the table, but she took no notice and buried her face in the crumpled pile of tissues.

  Her name is Sara, a student at a nearby design institute. She is a passionate artist who took up Architecture as her major; a subject that forced her into a ride through trauma.

  "I love drawing," her heart whispers quietly, scared to admit what she is about to. "But it will earn me nothing unless I choose this."

  "Yet now its taking away my soul in big chunks, and it hurts," a drop of tear rolled down, soon followed by a couple more.

  "What is the use of a guaranteed life when you'd be dead inside?" A voice shrilled from inside Sara, slightly frustrated and impatient.

  "You need a job to live without causing trouble to your parents," an apathetic voice answered back from within.

  "Even if you stick through for another two or three years, without the passion you'd never survive," the higher, more scratchy voice yelled. "Why are you worrying so much? You're still 18! Why can't you allow yourself to acknowledge your own pain? Why won't you rescue yourself?"

  "What if it'd be a mistake?" The voice that was apathetic now trembled slightly, its words a little slurred. "Someday your parents will die. You not only need to repay your debts, you need to take care of them and make them happy."

  "I don't know," a third voice spoke out. It continued without waiting for the other two. "I'm crying, I'm tired. I just want to sleep, my spirit is in a thousand pieces." The voice stated; like a young child that refuses to understand the rules of the world.

  Sara is still struggling to gather her breaths together. For the nth time of the month, voices that represent different parts of her are debating furiously. It sounds cliche, and it can be compacted in a single sentence; but even though she knew that its pointless, she thinks.

  And she keeps thinking, because thinking is who she is and who we are.

  The night went on, sanity dripped away from Sara along with her tears, hitting the cold marbled floor. And so, this story will continue in an endless loop, concocted out of countless lines of thinking laid upon each other, forming an inescapable cage that traps Sara.