Sonder

Beating Void

  A dull blue filled the world above. Pastel would be the perfect word to describe it, but Anna could not feel the mellowness that she would have felt from such a nice hue. There is a filter in her eyes, and all of her other senses that desaturated everything.

  "I'm waiting now," a voice stifled.

  Men and women of different ages and styles sped past, all with a place to go. They snaked their way through each other, and colours blur together. The static noise of people chatting and occassional yelling that will always come made Anna's ears itchy.

  "They all too, once waited."

  Anna raised her head once more. A mundane sky, grey and cold. Birds that once soared majestically across it are now nowhere to be seen. Like pillars that support a plane, tall skyscrapers made of steel and glass rose high. They vary in sizes of windows and storeys, but none go higher after a certain point. Perfectly disorganised pillars.

  "It was once vivid, why would it not become so again? Life comes in cycles."

  Anna nodded once. She started to feel drowsy. The already blurring colours melt into each other even more. Perhaps they will become indistinguishable from each other, becoming one shade of a boring gray.

  "Wake up, open your eyes."

  There were nobody. The street is empty, and the walkways now feels much wider than it should have been. Trees, benches, buildings, all have melted into one single shade. As every beat Anna's heart makes, the world goes darker. Now, the colour would melt into the boundary as well.

  "Why panic? The world will still go on."

  Anna took a breath, and again, and again, and again and again and again. She could not stop herself. A pair of hands are choking her heart. It seemed that her lungs thought they had to beat as much as her heart did.

  It was painful, and it was a suffering. And even so, Anna clutched her hand tightly. She kept taking in, and vomiting what little air she had in an eternal repeat. Even if the world dies out, even if her organs stop working, she knew she possessed the ultimate lifeline that can keep her going forever.

  A warm, timbre voice that speaks out to her. A voice that strokes her head gently into a heavenly lullaby, a series of harmonious words that sings ever so kindly. A frequency that shakes all the black out of her.

  Anna kept on suffering, and she waited. Even when the pain was so tremendous she started to feel numb, she endured. At the end she could feel barely anything, and she could distinguish nothing from anything. Not even from herself.

  Everything are grey. The voice that Anna waited for never came; disappeared into the void before she knew it. At last, before the curtain will fall, even her fond memories will fade and lose their warming hues.