Heart of Lead

I woke up with lead weighing my heart down; my blue soul and tired body in combination were the culprit behind it by shoving it down my throat. So, I did not feel the lump in my throat like the earlier mornings; because it had sank down to the bottom of my heart like an anchor at the bottom of the sea.

It was hard to breathe with such heaviness in my chest. My legs were weak to stand, my eyes were teary from suffocation. It was difficult to inhale and exhale the oxygen. My hands were in an aimless trance, restless from not knowing what to do. In my head, my mind was a fog of confusion: What day is it today? Do I have to go to work today? Can I don't go today?

Fatigue, was the one word that echoes behind my ears, over and over again like a ghost haunting in a familiar place.

I bent down to my book-scattered floor to find the mobile phone that woke me up in the first place. With a quick glance, it answered my questions: Tuesday. Yes. No.

Unless you are sick, the sweet devil's tempting voice whispered into my ear.

I walk into my bathroom and began brushing my teeth. Yet, it did not mean that I ignored the temptation. Inside my head, I debated on why I should go to work and praying hard that I am ill.

I spit the white foam out onto the basin before rinsing my mouth with tap water. As I did, I had a good look at myself. I traced from my eyes to my short neck to my protruding collar bones to my small chest to my skinny waist with emerging rib bones. The skin is fair, but too fair. In front of the mirror, I stared at my naked self.

I had lost a lot of weight and it is not healthy.

My eyes back to my face, the exhausted pair of eyes greeted me back. For the first time in my life, I found my eyes to have no life, no soul and dead looking like that dead goldfish I had as a child. However, I found it hard to believe that those eyes were mine. What ever happened to that active teenage girl's eyes, full of life and hope? Where are those happy eyes?

My lips parted to release the water that had been rinsing my mouth. In conjunction, I started coughing, coughing and coughing. Disgust overwhelmed me with the thoughts on who I was and who I am now. The comparison between that adolescent trapped in memory and the adult-self imprisoned in reality. How can it be? How can it be this horrible? Who am I, truly?

The empty stomach concaved to throw up the transparent-coloured gastric juice that left a trail of uncomfortable burning sour sensation in my oesophagus. The dinner was only an apple; so there would be nothing left after 5 hours of sleep; That is not including the 3 hours of tossing and turning in bed before landing myself into slumber land.

Reality, they always say, is something we must learn to accept. Whatever reality is, we must learn to run along with it as if it's no big deal like running on the treadmill. We cannot fight against it or else we'll be more miserable than ever. There is nothing we can do about it, that is the reality.

Nevertheless, no one realizes that the perception of reality is nothing more but an illusion. The reality that they are talking about is nothing more but the environment around us that forces us to bow to their commands. Even if it is beyond our control, no one seemed to notice that people build reality with their own hands. We allow things to happen because we did nothing to change it. We are, after all, cowards.

If we look up to the reality inside ourselves, we should be aware on how we are feeling. To be in denial with one's inner reality, is still considered as not living in reality. That is because our inner reality is still considered as part of reality.

The sad pair eyes glanced back, questioning me: What is your inner reality?

I am tired, I replied to myself. I am tired, I am sick of all this running around to make others happy. I am an unhappy bitch. I hate myself for waking up in the morning to go to work, for refusing to take any leave, for fighting with myself every morning with a fucking lump in my throat. I hate my job, I hate myself for not fighting what I wanted so that people can be happy and feed on me. I hate myself for being naive in believing others who claimed that they love me and they know what is the best for me when they only cared about themselves. I hate this shitty self, I hate the selfish people around me and I hate the way people tell me that this is reality when they only want me to be part of miserable.

I turned away from the mirror, grabbed the phone, left a message at the company to say that I was not well and slump back to bed. If you think that I was only being lazy, then you are wrong. My heart has been ill for a long time but I didn't want to acknowledge it. I had been sick with everything around me, I had been fed up with people telling me to forget my dreams and goals, only because they had to give it all up for the benefits of selfish people like themselves.

I'm tired, let me rest for a day, I'll be refresh the next day. Let the lead in my heart evaporate to grow into a lump that my depression can shove it down my throat again.