She didn’t know where it came from, the fear. One day a switch was flipped and everything changed. What was life like before? It was normal, or on the conventional side of normal life compared to this. Now, the old routines of breakfast-lunch-dinner, home-work-home, wake-leave-return and everything else that comes with ‘normal’, were a distant memory. How could a schedule be kept when this thing called fear had such a tight grip – so constricting that it confined her to this space she must call home.
These days her world consisted of her own boundaries – but the fact they were hers didn’t make it easier to break them. Trolling through rooms that grew smaller and smaller, gazing through curtains at the lives outside, sitting and thinking – those were the deeds that filled her day. Every day, spent inside because fear restricted her world.
Company was rare, conversation was infrequent and days could go by without a spoken word. Imagine, not seeing a soul or speaking out loud for days at a time. There weren’t ever passing exchanges in the small confines that she’d kept herself in for so long. Not like on the city streets, in shops and on walks through parks, when at least strangers offered timely interactions. A fleeting glance from a stranger is more than she’d received for a while now.
So, why stay that way? It was like she had no choice, no control over the matter. Was it the expectation of danger, a faint memory sitting in the distant past, or a deeper psychosis that rattled away unnoticed somehow? Maybe the changing world was all too much for her delicate nature and old-fashioned ways. In her eyes, the fact was, she was trapped. Trapped because of everything the fear brought in that she herself could not let out.
And now, these walls, these fours walls that close in daily, are the extent of her world.
–
In her dreams, she has no fear. Boundaries are questioned but nothing is out of reach for her. The hallway isn’t as long and the door isn’t padlocked by worry. Although questions still flood in through the crack in the front door, approaching the porch isn’t problematic. In her dreams she is prepared, mentally, and already wears shoes on her feet because the day is waiting and normal life beckons with its errands and surprises. In her dreams, the place outside of her world doesn’t bring the same trepidation. As her stride breaks the threshold, the sun shines a little brighter in her world.
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