The baby's wails hit me like sledge hammer: wah, WAH, WAH. With no rhyme or reason, they start, like clockwork, two hours before my clock goes off.
I open my eyes to a plain white ceiling. And darkness. The apartment is as it was the first day I got it- neat, orderly and sparse with minimal furniture. A bed, a desk, and a cupboard in one room. Two chairs and a table in the kitchen. A laundry shelf in the bathroom and a broom closet.
In the, what, eight years? that I've been here I've never once remodeled or decorated. The thought just didn't occur to me. It was like a guest living in his own house.
I wonder what Dora thought of the flat. Plain? Dull? Lifeless? Thoughts like, I wish I had bought at least a welcome mat or some dollies float through my mind. They're a first for me because I've never even entertained the possibility that someone might want to come to my house.
That they might actually want to spend more time with me than they have to.
I sit up after the baby persists in its attempt to wake up the entire building. Although its a new sound, my body had already adapted and become numb to it. It doesn't even give me a head ache now.
I press the palms of my hands against my eyes softly, mimicking a ritual I once saw on TV. Mimic, mimic, mimic. That's all I can do- that's all I know how to do. So when I'm faced with a situation I've never seen anyone else in, I run.
What cowards mimes are.
What a coward I am.
***
The buildings whizz pass me, slowly, hypnotically. The train pulls me forward, the momentum pushes me back and I feel like a rubber ball being bounced back and forth between the two forces. It's peaceful, though, because the forces are familiar and because the motion they create feels like home to me.
I like to believe, sometimes, that emotions have shadows. Just like objects in the real world do. Except these shadows aren't dependent on the sun- they never disappear completely. They're always there, in the background, waiting. And the moment you let your guard down, they'll devour you and everything within you.
You're left as nothing but an empty husk.
I feel those shadows growing around me now. Lingering in the corners of my peripheral vision, waiting. Creeping up the underside of my clothes, watching. The jostle of steel against steel, of humans against humans, breaks the silence in intervals. While the sound is there, the shadows retreat. But where the sound dies down to a hum, they grow and threaten to overwhelm me.
No.
I don't want the static to return.
YOU ARE READING
The Wish To Live {A Cell phone novel By Vyria}
RandomInitially I had wanted to write a cell phone novel for the fun of it- something new to try out.But then this story took an unexpected dark twist and I, the author, became suddenly very interested in turning this into an actual story. So here's th...
