Something… something bit her inside. She couldn’t name it, yet it was there. It used to pop up at totally unexpected times.
It was when all the colours literally burned in her eyes that the sepia-toned-filter turned itself on. The people and things moving around her all turned into an insignificant haze while the tinnitus-like sound in her ear-drums grew louder and louder making the trifling noise around her sound like a hum. The fingers that technically almost froze with the cold felt dead already and the smell of the freshly baked pizzas from the restaurant she passed by did not tease her numb taste buds or her neglected stomach. There was a much more painfully engaging stimulus she was trying to deal with, which was inside her for some odd reason; her emptiness.
Her heart, which otherwise beat lightly against her ribs, turned silent and stone cold, so exceptionally cold that she felt it in spite of the indocile numbness that prevailed over all her senses. The colder it went, the number she got and the number she got, the colder it went and so on till the point that her brisk walk broke into a run. Yes, she ran; that was the only way to feed the thing inside her that fed on cold things; all cold things –cold, physically, emotionally and … she didn’t think more than that. She just knew how to identify cold things instinctively. The run instead of warming off her muscles had the opposite effect for she had deliberately left her coat at home and the ice-cold wind blew even more fiercely almost through her.
She had plenty of time to feed the emptiness; she had left her warm apartment feeling claustrophobic an hour earlier. She ran and ran; the wind blew and blew against her freezing nose, ears and lips; the thing fed on and on. She knew not where she headed towards; just that she never wanted this anaesthetic high to end. Her wish came true exponentially when a sudden downpour began soaking her through and through with ice cold water; what a rush she felt! It was like heaven, or putting it more appropriately, like a cold hell.
Lost though she was in her pathetic reverie, her unconsciousness had steered and brought her towards the doorstep of her office but it couldn’t guide her longer. It couldn’t over power the thing that was still feeding on the rain. So she stood motionless thoughtlessly outside the shed above the huge glass door; running wasn’t increasing the wind’s velocity with the dense rain anyway. Just then she felt something, something otherworldly.
The thing totally changed her perception. It made the thing go away and made her realize the real situation. The revelation sank in gradually; boots filled with rain water –like a boat in a storm – half way up to her shank, fists tightly closed denying to give in to the frost bite, muscles of the entire body stiff, shivering hysterically from head to toe, the thick rain washing her like a car in a car wash and also that the otherworldly thing that had stung her cheek was a tight slap. There, her vision adjusted, came out of the sepia-toned world and saw her friend trying to hold on to her swaying umbrella with a retired expression. ‘Oh!’ was all she managed to mumble and walked past her friend, into the glass door. What followed pushed her into a well full of realization, out of which there was no coming back.
Yes, she was Rapenzel, trapped by loneliness, but there was no prince that would come to the rescue out of the sheer goodness of his heart, fighting against the bramble bushes fate had grown for her and risking his life or in this case his time to climb up the walls around her. Yes, she was Cinderella with sorrow around her but there were no fairy godmothers to depend on. Yes, she was Snow White with evil around her but without a prince with magic lips to kiss the vice away. Yes, she was Fiona, almost ugly (read: not anorexic) but there was no good hearted Shrek. Most importantly, she was she in her own unique world, that life had to go on and that there was no room for lamentation over her who she had imagined to be her prince.
Numb reveries were mocked upon.
