Hi everyone! I have the distinct pleasure of hosting Friday Fiction this week and I am quite thrilled. I am also amazed that I actually have something finished and ready to go. ^_^ To join, just add your name and url to the Simply Linked gadget below. Don’t forget to read and comment on other stories–we all love the feedback–and there’s some pretty neat stuff to read.
Author’s Ramblings: This is a small piece of prompt fiction on the topic “Headache”. I’m not quite sure why it took the direction that it did–but it was an interesting prompt just the same. I hope you enjoy it, because I sure had fun writing it. ~_^ Happy weekend and enjoy the read!
Headache.
Throbbing, pounding, forcing my sanity just beyond the grasp of my cold fingers. I can see it. I can feel it. Watching me, mocking me, taunting me…just out of reach of my freezing hands.
I can wonder many things—like why I can’t touch it, why I can’t reach it and why on earth are my hands so cold all the time?
But instead, I sit there or stand there and do nothing. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do something. I just know that I don’t want to be doing nothing all the time. Nothing loses its magic when I do it too often.
Nothing.
Something.
Everything.
One thing, maybe.
It’s circling somewhere in the back of my mind, carving the shadows from the wall and spraying the rawness with vinegar.
I feel pickled and salted—with nowhere to go.
Voices surround me. Reality compels me. But instead, I sit there or stand there and do nothing. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to do it?
I have my world spread out before me and I’m doing nothing, because I can’t get free from the hands grasping my head, with their tight, wicked claws digging into my brain and raking it through over and over.
I feel pain and no pleasure.
Pain of every degree and horror of every moment. I only know that I can’t think straight. I can’t think crooked. I can’t make it work the way I want it to, because I can’t stop my head from torturing me.
This constant, throbbing, pounding and prying that is threatening so deliberately to draw me to my knees. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to make it go away without a sigh. I want to be free. I want to be me. But this headache will not leave me be. I know not what to do. I do not think I care.
I am tired of this normality mess. I am tired, exhausted and depressed. I want to find a different view of things, a place where my soul can sing.
I want to get away from this personal prison of pain. I want to tear off these shackles and hurl them into the very pits of despair and watch them burn in the flames of hope. I want to stand there and laugh at the very thing that is ripping me apart from within. I want to stare it in the eyes and dare it to live. Dare it to die. Dare it to lie there and try to take me one more time. I want to force it through the same mental gymnastics, though the same frantic fantastic—through the same, long boring game where I am never sane.
This pain is not my life.
I am so much more than it. I have so much ahead of me, but instead, I sit there or stand there and do nothing.
Why?
Why must I even ask?
There must be some purpose, some dream, some unspeakable heroic deed which only I am capable of doing, but instead, I sit there or stand there and do nothing.
But I am tired of this. I have decided at last. I have decided that I will not take another glass, another pill, another sample of someone else’s reality. I want my own. I want my life back. I want to see myself running faster and stronger, further away in the distance where my hands may be cold, but my head is clear.
Like train tracks, a familiar clickety-clack, a steady thrumming hum, a surety of security that remains.
I see the possibility, in spite of the pain.
I see the normality, in spite of the pain.
I see the fragility—that comes with this pain—and then I see the strength.
In the night when the darkness beckons me, I pray. In the morning when the sun’s light has not yet breathed in life, I pray. In the midst of twisted, torrid confusion, I pray. As the voices draw me in, calling my name, I pray. As the faces are watching me watching them, I pray. As the norms of this world envelope me, I pray.
For every prayer that I breathe, a strand of hope is returned. For every strand that I receive, I bind upon these chains. As the chains grow heavy, I find strength in the golden threads that are holding me together. As I stop stumbling after these chains, I find that I do not carry them alone. I find that as I fill my arms with these heavy, burning links, there is someone beside me, lifting, carrying and moving. I know who it is. I know why and now I feel very shy.
Struggling in my cubicle of pain, it is easy to think that I am worthless. I may be hopeless, clueless and completely dense.
But I want my Father’s help, I want to hear His wisdom and I know that He made me with more than common sense.
He will not rip away these walls unless I let Him do so. He will not take control unless I give Him these keys. I know that I must give it all over. So in the midst of nothing, I will not stand or sit there. I will do something. I will give more than I have, I will live deeper than I breathe and when this strangeness comes for me, I will not just give in.
Throbbing.
Pounding.
Stabbing.
Pain.
I am alive. I am alive to feel every throb, every pound and every little stab. But I am still me.
When He lifts the curtain of pain from my burdened shoulders, I realize the strength of His name. Because in the corners where the light does not reach, He can chase the shadows away—and as I ask and wait, I stand there or sit there and I stay.
© Sara Harricharan