I Can't Breathe

• Aurora Beveridge, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2021

I don’t know why I keep going, the air is getting thinner. Each breath is only more suffocating and the lure of eternal sleep intoxicating. The rocks are so sharp, and my hands are bleeding. I still limp up and up, there is rumbling, and I start to move sidewards at a sickening pace. Movement costs energy that I do not have. I am not sure why, to avoid the oncoming, crushing, all-consuming distress? Why do I try to avoid it, it will crush me anyway? Is it simply out of self-preservation?

The air is too thin, the world starts to drift. Only slightly, but enough to be unnerving. There are shapes fading on the horizon, they might be mountains, but something else sinister looms. Blinking in and out of reality, the impending pain of existence coming into realization. The rumbling is coming close, I can feel the mountain shaking and crumbling. My only anchor to this place, destroying itself from the inside out. I can see the rocks, jagged and irregular throwing themselves down and into my sides. Piercing my skin and the only hope of holding together. I’m being thrown backwards, violently, weights crushing my chest. This semblance of actuality splinters and cracks. Falling with the rocks that are crashing into this husk of a world. I can’t breathe, the rocks are crushing my chest and the air is still too thin.

Everything is fading, blinking and oozing. The colours are whirling. The rocks are deafening. Everything is fading to the colour just before dawn, the noise and colour are bleeding, crashing and hurling themselves at my senses. Is it clearing? Do I want it too?

Am I still flying past unimaginable depths, into the pits of the Earth? The weight of those all-consuming rocks is heavy on my chest, does it really need to stop? Is It the punishment of the broken and collapsing? This fate was decided long before our time by some higher power. I still cannot breathe, the air is so humid now, as opposed to the thinner air I remember, like ice to fire. It is stifling hot as opposed to the ice-cold of mountains that destroyed themselves from the inside out. Maybe these burning depths will release me to go back to the cool floating sensations of my mountains. One pain swapped for another.

I feel more like myself here, and I would like to leave. Go back to the disjointed version of events that soothed my patched-up brain. Back to the world where even my collapsed limbs and torn up mind, were functioning and believable. This fiery abyss is dredging up feelings of a fixed body, unchangeable, so alien to the airy floating of the clouds above where I wish to be. In the cool, mellow, ambience of those jagged mountains. Even with that impending threat of crushing actuality, I would rather be there than here. In these depths of Tartarus, with creatures and realities looming. I would like to go back home now.