by Juliana Subia
Spinning.
The world spun, like a wheel of a car that’s about to go out of control. The world spun, like a spinning top, the thin and sharp needle threatening to stab your skin.
The world spun. Spinning and spinning and spinning, into a dark void of senselessness and winter, as a million thoughts and a million words spun along with it, into my mind.
It was a vision of distortion, a vision of chaos that only existed in my mind.
But everything only existed in my mind.
Long gone were the summer days, the summer days of late nights and beaches, of karaoke contests and crowded dinner tables. Today it was winter. I could no longer pretend it was not cold and desolate.
I woke up and drops of winter flew from the sky, slicing my skin as it slipped through the cracks of my opened window. The barren trees and the burnt-down house from below were covered in deep white snow. Everything in this world was planted on the ceiling, gravity warped, reality distorted in every aspect I can imagine.
Silence.
I scream. Today I was alone. I’ll scream and I’ll scream, filling the empty landscape of sterile houses which the strong wind whistled through.
Alone. Alone. Always alone.
My only friend, my dear kindness, betrayed me, leaving me so vulnerable, so weak, so alone, as it pulled out its handgun and shot me square at its former home. My heart. My heart and I convulsed, shaking and helpless in a synchronous movement, shuddering like a fish on my bed. I was alone, no one would want to help me.
I shuddered, I shuddered, the snowy wind picking up its pace, as my heart jumped out my body, leaving its cot. The blood rolled out of my bodily void. Tears, thousands and thousands of tears, ones that captured core memories of pain, ones that became the symbols of anger and sadness, made rivers lead to oceans that I’ve made before, a few droplets crystalizing on the way.
But my brain hissed at me:
Stop crying. Stop hemorrhaging blood out of your heart. Stand up, sit straight, get ready for your day. Act normal because you are normal.
And so I did.
I patched myself back together again, sewing shut the hole in my heart,
The room warped back into its normal state of mess and art, the winter reversing, the rubble and noise of the streets fading into the background, the rivers and the oceans evaporating into the now-shining, sweltering sun. The heart goes back, my criminal kindness becomes shackled to me again. They become my prisoners again. But my tears, my crystalized tears never melt, they just stay there.
And they always will.