She’d been reading for four hours now.
Her eyes hurt.
She was tired, her head ached, her swollen heart sunk, bells clang and clashed in her ears. But there was still so many chapters left, so many pages to read, so many things to do, so many lives to live. The clock on her shattered screen read two a.m. Too many things to prove, too many people to please, too many lives to live. And she was so tired.
Now, now to sit or never, by the side of the pale-faced moon.
The book lay heavy in her hands, she was never going to get there. The milk her mother had laid on the table stood cold. The lamplight flickered and the milk shimmered like the very cup of trembling. She took a sip. Tasteless, it was. The white, lacteous substance trickled down her throat, before forming the murky pool that is her self-consciousness. It wasn’t enough, she needed more. Too bad the glass was already half-empty. Not enough.
It was never going to be enough. Her knuckles were white as bone as she slammed the book shut. Even if she ended the book today, created five essays tomorrow and dragged home a trophy next week, it will still never be enough. She licked her parched lips, marveling at the alkaline flavor on the tip of her tongue. Wet tracks streaked down her cheeks like a miracle. Drops of them glistened in the air like a vision before vanishing into the alabaster fluid. The glass was still half empty, her existence felt half empty.
Too bad she was addicted. She had asked herself what the source was, puzzled over exactly when and where she had contracted the contamination. No, it wasn’t in the milk.
Her memory went back to the age of three. She had done something, she wasn’t sure what, and everyone was in awe. So she had to keep doing it, until the mere flickering thought of it haunted her like a nightmare and made feel her sick, made her feel bloated. So she had to let poison out. The blade glowed, obscuring her vision, her head hurt.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of the purple curtain brought chills down her spine.
She was drowning, but no one saw her struggle. Till she was reduced to nothing but a mechanical animal. The craving was still there, though its object was still unknown. It was weaker than cocaine but stronger than adrenaline. That metallic tang that made her, want to win, everything. She just had to achieve something or she would shiver and quiver in fear. Like a fragile dream plummeting down a december hill, she rolled and tumbled, snatching blindly at branches and arms and hands that all eventually let go, accumulating all that burden, all that snow that was what society called achievement, it only made her fall faster and land harder into the abyss that people called success.
She has fallen down the rabbit hole. She couldn’t get back up because the Jabberwocky had torn off her limbs.
And she signed with relief.
Pouring her mangled half-empty into the half-full of fragments and dreams, she drinks up.