Still

A white and orange light blossomed around the black roses of static beneath her eyelids. Her eyes flickered for a second and flashed wide open at the sight of the brilliant glimmers sliding off the panes of her windows. The wind barely kissed the glass and the trees loomed high and bright, stock still. Besides the distant trill of early birds, the world was at rest.

She passed her hand over her stomach, making sure she could still feel her hip bones under a small layer of what she preferred to think of as insulation for the freezing winters. Her heart jumped as the tips of her fingers signaled the ever-bearing presence of this lipid coat, and agitated, they quickly withdrew. She sat up and stared at her legs, arteries and veins kindling a slowly sweltering heat. To her, her legs looked like tree trunks, thick and thin with muscles built and torn in all the wrong places. Her black, drooping eyes stung in frustration when she squinted into the full-body mirror, urgent to find an unblemished feature. She stood still, searching.

In the unwavering reflection, she saw that her eyes were small and dusty, receded from months of looking but not seeing. Her ears, which heard but did not listen, hid behind her split hair, which flew in wisps across her face. She felt the raw cotton t-shirt gnawing roughly against her skin and crumbs grating down her throat, all the while trailing thick, tired saliva in the roof of her tongue. The skin peeled off her scratched cheeks and tickled the scars that never healed. Her legs were purple and pink and brown, bruised and cut from falling one less time than rising. To be technical, her poptilial fossa sported a tumor-like keloid and her second toe suffered permanently from an avulsion fracture. She knew these facts because she was brimming with knowledge, but empty of everything else. Her cuticles were too small, her nails were too dry, and she was altogether imperfect. She stood still, loathing herself.

In her fatigue, she felt a deep, unwavering churning of dissatisfaction. She was a sandbag, and the world was an ocean, and no matter how full of sand she was, she was, after all, made of sand. The ocean would overtake her motionless sack of a body, and she would drown and crumple until the tide fell back for the day. The violent storms would leave her soaking, burdened with everything with which she had filled herself. In desperation, she would hide her heaviness by decorating herself with frail seashells, and she would look in the mirror to extract the smallest broken shards. But her methods failed successfully time after time, because the tides always came back and washed away the feeble fragments, leaving her naked shell exposed, grossly visible in every reflective surface she passed. She stood all the more still now, because this way she could angle her body to find the perfect portrait of herself.

Some days, she would grace her mattress with futile punches and her pillow with trickling tears, but for the most part, she would slump against the dry walls or sprawl herself full length across the thick carpet and become motionless, mind racing uncontrollably, meticulously combing through the dissatisfactory qualities of her body. The insides of her tightened, curled fists quivered with anger and disappointment. She would hold her breath as long as she could, crushed by her own contracting chest, holding her bloating, shameful face in an expression of forced neutrality. She stood still, writhing inside.

One day, she could no longer hold her breath. Her face had become flushed from forgetting to breathe as she obsessed over her body composition.  Her entire body had become a plank, not just rigid with fear, but literally straight and inflexible from immobilizing herself in front of the mirror for so long. She thought about the different ways she could rid herself of the sharp shells that stuck to her sandbag.  She stood still, eyelids flickering slightly.

She walked to the bathroom and bound her weakened hair into a ponytail, biting her lip because this process unveiled her face even more. The white light hit the edges of her exposed face, revealing the softness of her cheeks and the fading of her eyes, but in place of her usual pallid, porcelain expression were pulsing capillaries, crazed with a fervent desire to break free. Even though she had barely moved more than a few yards, her heart thudded against her bare chest, crawling slowly up her throat.

Almost convulsing with the inability to contain herself, she plodded clumsily down the stairs and pulled on the shortest socks she could find. She dreaded to see the bones of her ankles covered by cloth, appearing thicker and straighter than she knew they actually were. Her running shoes engulfed her feet, and her large women’s t-shirt covered everything but her forearms. In a minute she was standing outside, quietly gathering the courage to unravel herself. She stood still, wondering.

She surveyed the outside world, which, if it were an ocean, would be completely peaceful. The sky was cloudless and the breeze maintained a constant gentleness, characterizing the typical, perfect day. The sidewalks were clean, the lawns were mowed, and the bushes were pruned. Birds flitted by her, leaves fell past her, and chipmunks darted behind her. The ecosystem was the definition of homeostatic. In the endless rotation of seasons and the unpredictable antics of creatures, nature was still.

The sound of creeping waves rushed into her ears. She broke into a slow jog, noting the tightening of her previously atrophying calves. Her arms pumped in an almost swaying fashion, awkward, unsure of how to propel her body forward. Her shoulders were slumped but began slowly arching backwards as she ran faster and faster as sand trickled furtively out of her flowing t-shirt. She felt a slight weight alleviated, but she could not check to make sure her carefully arranged display of shells was still in place. She slipped closer to the shoreline. The springs in her legs began to oscillate from the sudden, elastic release in tension. Waves of fresh air beat her face and dove into her lungs, cleaning more sand from the walls of the sandbag inside of her. She had been still for too long, and now she could not stop.

Her quadriceps burned and she gasped for breath, stomach heaving in and out, up and down. Her hips were sore from the endless, bouncing stress, and her eyes would sting from the falling sweat. She furiously leapt across a thousand sidewalk cracks and crushed the tousled grass, not once considering the notion of resting. Her body slowly exhausted itself as she ran, always pumping, always gliding.

When she neared the end of the run, she saw in front of the chuckling sprinkles a giant tidal wave. It reared beyond the rooftops, ready to mercilessly engulf every suspecting and unsuspecting victim, to carry away every worthless and worthy object in its way. Sporting but a few handfuls of scattered seashells in her sandbag, she ran straight toward the wave, and it collapsed on her.

She was still.