The Silent weight
It’s another friday… another day to wait until it served it’s purpose.
Gabrielle sat in the right side corner of the classroom, airpods in but no music playing. It was easier that way—her bratty clasmates would assumed she were too lost in a song to talk.
The ticking of the wallclock is all she can hear about, each second pulling her deeper into a dept she couldn’t fathom.
She didn’t know when the heaviness had started. Maybe it was months ago, or maybe years, but now it was constant, like wearing a backpack filled with stones. She had tried to talk about it once, to say that everything felt pointless, but the words had tangled in her throat, too thick to spit out.
“It’s just a phase,” they had said. “Everyone feels this way sometimes.” everyone would concur… But this wasn’t sometimes.
There are times that she felt that a headache is too sudden…
That a rumbling stomach is a nuisance, so she’ll eat, eat and eat more, but still the rumbling stays.
There are days that it was heavier to even get up and go about anything, and there are days that just too sunnier that she’d like it to be.
Self harming is dangerous, she knew, but when you can only insite it on yourself and not hurting anyone else?!
After school, She walked the familiar route home. She almost forgot, it’s almost the BER month, the autumn leaves have scattered across the sidewalk, glowing red and orange in the fading sunlight. It seemed strange how the world could look so beautiful when everything inside her felt so gray. She hold her heads up and shoved her hands into her pockets, trying not to be run over by the busy intersection.
There was a park just a few blocks from their house - a small space with see-saw, a slide, two swings and a single bench.
For some reason, Gab stopped. She hadn’t meant to, but her legs seemed to carry her there, almost as if they knew she needed a moment to breathe. She sat down on one of the swings and closed her eyes, trying to silence the thoughts that never seemed to stop. Swinging to a mild movement… and then to a much stronger gravity, still closed eyed.
“Hey,” a voice broke through the quiet.
Gabrielle stopped and opened her eyes. A girl she recognized from school stood in front of her. She wasn’t in her classes definitely, but she’d seen her around the campus, a grade step ahead of her 10th grade, always with a sketchbook in hand. Today, the sketchbook was tucked under her arm, while her hand is grasping an apple.
“Mind if I sit?” she asked.
Gab shrugged. She sat anyway.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Gab resume her swinging and the girl opened her sketchbook and started drawing, her pencil moving quickly over the paper. Gab glanced over, curiosity piqued, and saw that she was sketching the park… the swing... HER.
“Why are you drawing me?” She asked, her voice hoarse from disuse.
“Because you look like you need to be seen,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact. “Sometimes people don’t see you unless you show them something real.”
Gab was taken aback, she didn’t know how to respond. Instead, she watched her draw. The lines on the page became shapes and shadows and the shapes became something more—a quiet moment captured, not for anyone else but for them.
In that moment, the weight she’d been carrying felt just a little bit lighter. It wasn’t gone, but maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t carrying it alone anymore.
Sometimes, you just need to learned how to voice out and be heard!
