Meaningless voices scream into the deafening silence that is the inner workings of my mind. Her luminous eyes pierce my own. For the briefest of brief moments, our eyes have met; two pairs of isolated eclipses falling upon one another.
One surrounded in green, the other in brown.
The shrieks of first life sound at this exact moment, as do the painful goodbyes of loved ones, but neither pair of eyes seem to notice. They unravel just as quickly as they had first met, falling further and further apart with every rushed and jumbled step. She now keeps her eyes down, trailing the eternal cracks embedded in the concrete floor. She takes in an icy breath to try and berid her own muddled thoughts. The air is forced into her lungs, synchronized with at least a million other people, yet nonetheless, the moment could not be more pure; more individual.
She learns the eyes have no boundaries the hard way, stumbling yet again on another pair. These are different from before, they’re hard, a loutish vibe circling the iris, forcing the regret and heartache they feel onto her own already heavy chest.
She pushes her eyes away yet again, picking her pace up in an attempt to escape the world behind her. She can feel it slipping, the confidence and individuality she thought she had mastered. She can feel her chest collapsing in on itself, an internal alarm screaming at her to get it together. But she can’t. The astronomical scale of everything around her crashes down onto her fragile frame. She can’t cope in knowing that in a few seconds another life will be lost, a collective of individual worlds shattered; utterly ruined. She will never know the lady screaming into her phone at her left, or the rushed man by her right.
Never.
Never more than a blur in her memory, one that’ll be forgotten, swiped away like a drop of rain on a stormy day. The smudged faces pass her without notice, her impact ignored, like an explosion, minus the boom. How is she expected to create change and webs of thought if she’s skipped over like an irrelevant page in a well loved book? She doesn’t matter to anyone beyond her short paragraph. She has an unknown set of words she’s allowed to write, the fear of everything around her threatening the magic number as every life changing second ticks on. A symphony of words lie at bay, just behind her heart, but no one will ever realise the struggle it takes to fetch them, one by one.
She hopes to live like the seven billion people around her, yet, in a way that’s completely different.
Year 9 English @ Bossley Park High 