but live.

for you

i don’t understand what you’re saying.

the words coming out of your mouth sound like gibberish to me. are you even real anymore? i do remember a time when we were real but now i don’t. i am detached. where are you? or the question is, where am i?

i’m so lost, like in a wide white room with no walls just a vast white plane. you walk and walk but you reach nowhere. you look up hoping for a ceiling, but all you see is white. no shadows, no corners. neither can you hide nor be seen. you don’t feel scared or disappointed. you don’t feel good or bad . you don’t feel anything at all. you belong to a human body filled with working organs and a mind that thinks a lot but forgets to let you live when you could.

you walk longer, slower as each step tires you, as each thought fills your mind making you lose hope of reaching anywhere. so you sit down for a moment. you sit down on the marble floor and you feel it once again. the pain gathering at your temples and spine, pulling the rest of your body down. gravity is pulling harder than ever.

you know you can’t take this anymore. you think that any more of this could kill you.

yet you surrender to this blunt force of pain, like it is an old friend who came back for revenge after you betrayed him a long time ago; back when you didn’t know what was right and wrong. blood drips off his fists. an old black hood hides his scarred, sharp figure. his burgundy lips whisper your sins into your ears. you listen as it tears apart your insides till everything inside you is alive, raging and fighting out loud.

but you pause for a moment and look at him, standing a few feet away from you; alone, tired. suddenly, all that you thought of him, seems wrong. he is here to take you away. to a better place. somewhere where pain doesn’t fill your temples and spine and send you crashing to the floor. somewhere that pain becomes a memory and not a reality. he doesn’t tell you this. the silence you share does.

you get up and turn around to look for others. but there isn’t anyone but you and him. so you ask,

“is it time?”
to which he replies in a soft husky whisper,

“no.
run if you must. but live.”
a long silence follows.

“why?”you break the long-kept silence once again.

“you shall know,”
he says before he vanishes into thin air with the blink of an eye.

he is gone.

the pain is back. this time, strong and burning.

you walk a few more steps until the pain kicks in and you black out.

you wake up. hospital lights. your mother is sleeping on the bed beside. her cheeks covered with dried up tears.

where have i been?