His Day, Her Day – Reboot

Rebooting the story into a different setting. I’ll start with Her Day this time.

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As if being awakened from a dream, her awareness gradually returned. As the haze lifted away from her eyes, her senses tore away at her without mercy.

She lay on her bed, eyes wide open at the dark and empty ceiling. The only illumination in her room was a dull silver light, refracted through the translucent curtains from the window. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she started to see shapes born from the various shadows cast through the ghostly curtains.

There is nothing there. There is nothing there. There is nothing there. 

She knew there was nothing besides mere shadows cast from the moonlight on the ceiling. And that was what she kept telling herself.

There is nothing there. There is nothing there. There is nothing there. 

But she did not believe her own words. Glares from invisible eyes pierced through from the darkness. She felt like she was being watched from everywhere, even within a locked room in perfect solitude. Unable to bear her sight any longer, she shut her eyelids tightly. Yet perfect darkness was not what awaited her. Incomprehensible shapes and colours flashed from within her eyelids. A mottled flurry of noise continued to flicker in her vision. This was when she realized her ears were ringing.

The silence was deafening. A constant hum at a single pitch and tone played endlessly within her eardrums. And it seemed to progressively get louder, threatening to overwhelm her mind.

Her gasp for air broke through the silence. While taking long and hard breaths to drown out the silence, she felt more and more unsettled.

As if something was there.

As if the sounds of her breathing wasn’t hers.

Go away. Go away. Go away. Go away.

Her breathing became more rapid, as if in response to her irrational feelings. A wave of nausea washed over her and she responded by clasping her hands over her mouth. She could feel her hot breath washing over her fingers in an erratic rhythm. Her hands began to shake uncontrollably.

She opened her eyes again. Her dimly lit room flashed back into existence. It was the very same room she had slept in for years. Everything was placed where it belonged. But yet it all felt so unfamiliar.

Her breathing became faster and more erratic. Her throat convulsed hard enough to bring tears into her eyes. She could not calm her breathing and started to choke.

The sounds of coughing echoed throughout the room. She struggled to bring her breathing back under control. The flowing tears began to sting her eyes.

Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. 

Her tears blurred her vision, causing everything to look even more alien to her than it did before. Despite her pleas to herself, she could not calm down. In an act of desperation, she bit down onto her hand.

Her hand tensed up as pain struck like lightning. She could feel the taste of copper dancing on the tip of her tongue. The pain provided little relief to the overwhelming anxiety that was flooding her. She knew she could not hold on any longer.

And so she reached out for her salvation, a bottle of pills sitting at the corner of her bedside table. Her shaking hands struggled to unscrew the cap. She could barely maintain her grip on the bottle and her tear stained vision served only to hinder her attempts at getting it open.

Please. Please. Please. Please.

At last the cap came off, falling from her hands and filling her ears with a diminishing beat as it bounced several times off the floor before rolling to a stop. And her hopes for salvation died with it.

She stared eyes wide open into the empty bottle. As feelings of dread and despair emerged, her knees buckled and she collapsed in resignation. She had already known it was empty.

It felt like she was sinking through the ground as she hugged her legs tightly. She lay paralyzed on the cold hard floor until the cocktail of anxiety, unease and dread became unbearable and caused her to scream.

—

Like a fish out of water, she gasped for air. Her eyes had snapped wide open and reality had once again fell back into place around her. A gentle amber shade of light lit up a different room. She began to breathe in a constant rhythm.

It was a ghost from the past, refusing to let her go. It served as a grim reminder of a personal hell she was once trapped within. The days where she fought herself in that cold and dark room. The gates to that hell were still open, threatening to swallow her up in a moment of weakness. A moment that she decided that she will never allow herself to have.

She lay for a while longer, placing an arm over her forehead. After allowing a single tear to drip down her face, she got up and braced herself for a brand new day.

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~ by depleted on September 21, 2011.