Top of the Sky - Wasting my young years
Gloomy days pass by like an endless stream of rain pattering against the dirty windows, and yet it feels quieter inside her than ever before. It's as if the noise of the world enters the room, but none of it ever reaches her.
The one-bedroom apartment is suddenly far too big - like a space that is too wide for her fatigue and her thoughts, which can no longer find a ground. And yet at the same time it is far too small, the walls are getting closer and closer, trying to crush her. Too small for all the emptiness she carries within her and for all that is left of her.
Madeleine lies on the bed, the ceiling above her seeming to stretch endlessly until it blurs the outlines of the room. She stares upwards, but she no longer feels like she is really here. She is pulling herself out of her own body and turning her back on the world. Her thoughts are fragmented into shards that can no longer be put back together. She wants to remember the months she had with Charles - the pain and the happiness she found in him. But the memories seem to disappear in a fog that keeps blocking her view.
Her hand touches her stomach, almost mechanically, needing to feel herself to know that she still exists. That there is still something she can hold on to. But even that motion feels empty. Her hand on her stomach is like a foreign body that reminding her of something she can no longer grasp.
What she still has.
What she has kept.
A child.
But even the thought of the child feels like a shadow - something she can't touch, something that slips away when she tries to reach for it. It is the only thing that reminds her of him. But even this small spark feels like is a fading image, disappearing more and more into the darkness.
And then those dangling feet appear before her eyes once more - an image that floats in her mind again and again, a returning curse.
“Why?” she whispers, the words barely audible. They fade into the silence of the room without finding an echo. She no longer screams. There is no more pain that she can put into words. The pain is too deep, too silent, too overwhelming. It has burrowed into every cell of her body until it has dissolved her soul. She is like a shell, empty and hollowed out, her innermost being shattered into a thousand splinters and the wind has blown everything away.
There are no more answers.
Only silence.
Just this endless, crushing emptiness that she feels inside.
And the rain that will never stop beating against the windows - a constant, incessant pounding that is just as meaningless to her as the pounding of her own as her own heart.