My Short Stories

we were perfect together

With each exchange with you, my throat becomes tighter. Each word you say seems to make it grow in pain. I can't seem to discern if a word is stuck, depriving me of air or if I have finally lost control.

I take a step toward you, but my throat begins to tighten even more. The pace of my heart rises drastically. It seems to continue rising despite my efforts. Is this love? Is this nervousness? Or perhaps it is dread?

No matter what this is, my head gets a high from this game. This game I shouldn't love, but I do... maybe I'm just losing air.

With every word you say, less oxygen flows to my brain. But also, with every word you say, my heart flutters and speeds. You are pulling me in, convincing me it's nothing.

This sensation is new: am I breathless or am I suffocating? Or perhaps I am drowning... the voices sound underwater... muffled, hard to understand. Despite the voices around me that sound like my own, the voices around me telling me to stop, I keep walking forward. My throat hurts.

I have convinced myself of the high. Or rather, you have convinced me of the high: that it is all I want, that it is all I need. I am trapped inside myself, clawing at my skin to let me out.

The voices are louder now, but newly not only my own. The voices of fresh strangers, yelling, maybe calling, but I can't find a difference.

You take my mind of off the noise, you set me comfortably on a chair. Talking, all I ever want to hear is you talking. Only I seem to hear me. I begin to wish I could forget the sound of my own voice.

Then suddenly, without warning, you send me into the abyss. You have kicked the chair out from underneath me. The ground is so far away.

You had been preparing this noose, this noose of words, and I had been ignoring it, perhaps distracted by the façade you put on so expertly. It wrapped up my neck, my heart, and my mind. It was a trap set to pull all three apart.

A limbo presents itself to me. I hang, I lose all of my breath, but I can't seem to die. This is torture for my mind, but to my dismay, physically I am fine.

Hanging, I can't touch the floor, but, I can't fly away. I linger in a permanent state of suffocation and breathing, of life that is worse than death could dream to be.

I learn. Words can't really kill you, they can only make your only desire death.

Quickly, a new question presents itself to me: what is worse, the noose of words, or the noose of silence.

we were perfect for each other... or so I thought