the unabridged reader

Tick, tick, tick.
Time was watching each week pass by;
counting all the months that they led to.
Tick, tick, tick.
What is waiting at the end for you?

Boooooo…ooooo..mmmMMMmmm……

The explosion did not feel sudden. On the contrary, it felt more like a series of trickles. A continuous flow of intermittent pressure. Sometimes, violent and aggressive; and sometimes quiet, and barely felt.

On second thought, maybe it was a sudden and violent explosion. The reason it felt agonizingly slow was maybe because it confined me in this weird type of vacuum of being there; but at the same time, being nowhere.

Still, it didn’t feel like a flashy, attention-seeking, volcanic eruption. True to the host’s nature, it felt more like a creeping, anxious, unsure, and highly dangerous bubbling of boiling magma. The pressure just teetering and pushing beneath the surface. It was a gradual and painful never-ending expulsion of everything that was ever repressed.

There is no way to identify when it all started. But every choice made, and every day spent, that was meant for everyone else but myself, felt like tiny pricks of spiky magma laid like a blanket upon my skin. It made every muscle tense, it made my heart want to stop beating.

The sensation can also be likened to that of a morsel that is being devoured by a monster. I am but a minuscule and insignificant existence; but I am being flattered by the monster’s physiology that refuses to metabolise me. So I remain stuck within its jaws; enduring perpetual chewing, grinding, bruising, tearing.

Oh, at times I am allowed rest. Unmercifully allowed some moments of recuperation— only to be thrown back into the same excruciating cycle.

And here I stand and take it, just like I always did, as I always do. Quietly, brokenly, destructively, I await the state of blissful dormancy.
By then, will there even be enough of my soul left? I wonder.