Hello there, you bonkers little human. I see that you have reached the end of your voyage. Please confirm the pass code before continuing to the land of magic and mystery.
What?! You don't remember it?! How can someone forget something so predictabl...
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Have you ever tried to drown a rat?
I have.
Watch it scurry off on dry land. That animal just looks like a brown bloated piece of meat trying to roll its butt to places. But put it in water, and there you go with a cute innocent thing turned ferocious. It throws its limbs out and wriggles under your grip so viciously that you might as well feel as if its dead soul will haunt you and your future generations. So what do you do? You let it go.
I feel like a drowned rat now. Just that fate won't let me go.
In the first few moments, I am scornful. I shake my head, frowning at the poor old man. The president has lost it.
The next moments? This is when realization pours over me like eroding acid, and the words that finally settle into my mind send my neurons ablaze.
To say that I am scared would be an understatement.
I am stunned out of my wits, and realizing that I might as well be stunned out of my life within half a month makes me... laugh.
It feels like a weird reflex, when everyone around me is running in paranoia, jostling me like a stray ash particle. But what can I do? I am young. I don't know the right way to react when I am told that I am going to die. And so, I laugh my way back to home.
Some kind of distraught overtakes my mother when she sees me in this state, face flushed red with so much hysterical laughter that tears are streaming down my face.
"Wh-what?" she mutters, unable to form any coherent question. I don't blame her. What can she ask me, other than whether or not I have become a psychopath?
It is when I make it to my room that my hysteria finally dies. Now, I stare at the almost torn strips of my sandals. The tears. They don't come. I can weep the blight off my soul if the world doesn't end; there will be enough time. But if it does end... then now is the time to work.
Springing to my feet, I paw through the stack of barely touched books on a shelf, looking for a cover that, to my surprise, I remember to this day. It was a random photo that I had taken one day – with the silhouette of a torn kite fluttering in the wind as a lone boy chased it. I submitted it as an entry with not much expectation in mind, so when I saw it printed on the glossy cover of our year book from five years ago, I was gleeful.
It is nowhere on the shelf.
A stray broken light dangles from the ceiling of our storeroom, and I have to toe through the wreck of broken items in the dark to get to a pile of worn books. As dust trails into my nose, I sneeze. Just that my lungs don't recover. I feel as if some stone has collapsed on my throat, making me gasp for breath. My hands work on their own, and through my dim and blurred vision, I spot the yellowed cover.
The only thing easy about yanking out my asthma spray is that I always keep it in the same drawer. But the hardest part was sprinting away from my mother's gaze before she knew I was choking on air. She is paranoid enough already. No point in adding more to it.
