Guilt
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Kelly Lun, Grade 11, North Sydney Girls High School -
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Short Story
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2018
Excellence Award in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition
Guilt.
It’s a simple word, with a simple meaning.
But it is nowhere near as simple as it seems.
It burns my eyes and squeezes my throat; sending a stab through my gut and wrenching my heart from my chest. It’s a torrent of unstoppable and inexplicable agony that tears at me with its poison-tipped claws.
The guilt isn’t within me. It’s in the crumpled wrapper tossed innocuously on the unsoiled floor. It’s the empty plate in the sink littered with crumbs and the bags of crisps, hiding, waiting, inside a tightly shut drawer. It’s inside the ravished ice-cream tub and the empty aluminium cans thrown haphazardly in the recycling bin in a pathetic attempt to cover up the evidence. It’s in the half-eaten apple gone rotten; perched, forgotten, upon the white table, and within the opened, yet untouched form of a measly granola bar. It’s the shattered mirror left broken in the corner of the room, and the photos of skeletons wrapped in skin draped ominously across the baby-blue walls. It’s the consumption of a number, the impossibility of ingesting anything over 1200. 1000. 500.
It’s the number on the scale, staring back at me with a terribly smug contempt; the way the mirror twists and melts to form what I believe to be a distorted version myself, and the euphoric feeling of standing up and seeing stars in my very own disordered galaxy of slow and agonising death. It is the demon beside me that whispers into my ear, “you are the least important person here and don’t forget it”, hissing so softly I could’ve mistaken it for the chilling breeze of the wind. It is no more than existing, and no less than dying.
This one word is what keeps me awake in the darkest hours of the night; the object of my grief and pain, and it is but a word. A thought. An unseeable, lingering sensation that consumes me from the inside out.
That, to me, is guilt.