She felt like her brain was an overfilled water balloon which had just been pricked. Bursting in an instant, it splashed water heavily onto her lungs. Her insides began filling up with the heaviness, drowning her desperately beating heart, her throat, and her skull. Her eyes did not give away the fact that water pressed against the whites from behind, and her ears popped, yet did not let the water escape. Her head felt like it would implode from the pressure but her chest was going to beat Head to it. She breathed deeply. She remained quiet. Kai stared at her face waiting for a response. She looked straight and she just breathed till the inundation inside her subsided. Not trusting her mouth to keep in the secret which threatened to escape as vomit, she gathered control of her body and nodded gently. He smiled widely, and listed out the series of tasks that she had just agreed to carry out for him.
Zade usually walked, not focussing on anything in particular but looking all aorund. Her eyes saw everything, but her mind registered next to nothing.
It seemed impossible to those who surround her, how easy it was to do nothing. Zade lived in her room without ever feeling confined, she lay in bed re-watching mindless shows that she liked, without realising that the same episode had been repeated twice, and she had conversations with herself, without ever addressing herself. She spoke animatedly with imagined versions of her friends, verily in their absence. Zade decided that restraints were only physical. She decided that she could close her eyes and visualise anything, be anyone, go anywhere, be anything. She never needed to leave her bed.
She rarely did anything she was not forced or compelled to do. She never wrote without a deadline, sang without being prompted or moved without being cajoled by her roommate. Zade liked the idea of remaining in bed, especially on weekends, when she wouldn't move for 2 whole days. She imagined her spine decaying, her legs, melting into the bedsheets like her entire back had taken root into the mattress and hardwood. Her oversized t-shirt ran into the folds of the crumpled covers and she felt small, slight, delicate. She loved nothing more. She barely lifted her tiny wrists, her only thin body part. She could never bring herself to mutilate it with the blade of a knife though the edge of a scissor would often carve the bold reminder ‘FAT’ onto her supple, smooth skin. The mere white scratches made at night usually faded out by morning.
Zade rarely ever did anything unprompted. Did the ocean ever move if it weren't for the wind and the gravity pulling it in directions? She just wanted to remain but it was obligations and orders that made her rise up and crash, pull back or swell. Her head would often feel like it consisted of just air. Just air, that processes nothing, registers nothing. Those days she would focus on her gentle movement, registering only the slight chill that slapped her across the face and soaked into her arms and legs. She would look at her fingers fluttering across the keyboard in feather-like movements, how gently her hair kissed her skin, how she raised and rested her tiny wrists and her tiny ankles. She was lighter than a bird, having soaked all her weight into the mattress below. Like a frail, fragile bird she would think of her bones, how easily they should snap if she should try. She should try. But she was never one for pain. She could only hope that her face come in contact with a leather ball at 120kmph to her the crunch of her teeth, her hidden under chub jaw, and see the dark purple bruise under her cheekbone, finally having something defining about her average face. She could only hope that some monster grab her and in a swift movement, snap her ankle, or a bullet in a heroic leap, marr her beautiful shoulder, saving her lover’s chest. She could close her eyes every night and in that weightlessness, feel the curve in her lower back, atrophy slowly. She would close her eyes and be anyone, go anywhere, be anything. Her hips seemed to mirror the movements her mind made and so they bore they weight and soreness from her dreams. The sad truth was that the weak muscle in her ample hips were only ever sore from her constant sitting, nothing more.
Zade never moved more that she absolutely had to, or did more than what was required. But her restraints were only physical and her mind moved through dimensions of its own.
