The Withering

©️ © 2022 Pooja Pathak

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The voices were getting louder and louder, piercing through her ears, sinking straight into her mind. So tormenting and torturous that she couldn’t bear it any longer. To escape them, Sarah plunged her head into the bathtub.

For a moment, everything was calm and peaceful. Those voices were no longer whispering dirty secrets and ugly lies. Sarah could feel the silence she had been craving for days. But then the cold water filled her mouth and nose, got into her lungs, choking her breath and drowning her into the oblivion she wasn’t yet ready to accept.

She couldn’t breathe, and the only thing she could take in was icy cold water. The suffocation she felt was so unbearable that she started struggling to pull herself out of the bathtub. But then the thought that those voices would be back to haunt her down refrained her from doing so.

She struggled hard to resist the suffocation and pain, and when she couldn’t take it any longer, she jumped out of the bathtub and fell on the floor with a thud. She felt the numbness in her nerve endings, and her entire body shivered. Recollecting her strength, she got up from the floor and wrapped herself in a towel.

That wasn’t new for Sarah. She had been going through that feeling of getting haunted within her own body for a long time. The voices would never leave her alone, and they were getting stronger day by day, forcing her to believe something she didn’t want to. But the worst part was that she could neither tell that to anyone nor could she live with it anymore. It was getting life-threatening each coming day.

With her trembling limbs, she walked inside her bedroom. Fine hair on her skin rose due to the low temperature. She opened the bedside drawer and took out the pills, her way of fading out the voices inside her head. She took out two white tablets on her palm and stared at the watch. Ayaan would be home in another two hours. If she could just shut the voices till then, they could still go to the dinner date she had promised her husband.

Not so later, the voices started whispering in her mind again. So, squeezing her eyes, she shoved the pills into her mouth and swallowed them down her throat, shutting her eyes and mind both at the same time.