Felt Solitary

• Tala Abdel Khaleq, Grade 7, East Hills Girls High School
• Short Story
• 2021

Excellence Award in the 'Play On Words 2021' competition

Absence, afraid and aching. Impotent, paralyzed and incapable. Only feeling the lifeless soil bedding, with layers of blood in distinction to the fallen soldiers, beads of blood trickling from my forlorn fingers. My ears continue to throb as bullets whizz past, my exposed figure oozes in the red clay. Raindrops drizzle, drip, drip, drip. Not afraid to leave its trails on my grubby face, yet I still feel distant from the ‘outside world’. What’s this peculiar feeling? What if it’s not feeling? What if this is just my brain, my loneliness and what seems of my heart and its journey on undertaking a lifeless decay, deceiving me?
All I’m hearing is this continuous buzz, agitating my unsound mind. Barely breathing, becoming more and more stertorous, I take a laboured gasp. Stunned by the sudden bullet shells clunking onto the colourless soil, strangely enough, I feel more paralyzed than I already am. Why had I been so shocked? So, panicked? It’s already impractical to think I’ll survive this abominable and unprecedented pain, again I’m being deceived by my cluttered brain. Muffled screams echo amongst the wrecked field, in hope that I feel more alike to those who are suffering, yet I’m alone and isolated.
The surrounding atmosphere is gloomy and arid, with the expanding and dull smoke rapidly covering the obsidian-like sky, I would never have expected for what I thought would be an exciting involvement in the demolishing war, would instead bring tears, produce a terrorising insight and introduce a new wave of sadness. Whispers of hope endeavour to soothe me, but it’s apparent that my time will soon come to a halt. I am blind for not realising sooner, that the world is a disconnected puzzle that will continue to baffle me and is something I can never solve as life is limited and abrupt. Pondering on the sound of birds, the sound of nature, the sound of loved ones. But the thoughts choose to obliterate and sodden with the incessant rain. I feel such compunction to breathe one’s last, unaccompanied. Singularly, being by oneself.
My heart hits a powerful unforeseen rhythm, daring me to obey it. Tormenting and excruciating, my wheezing conveys otherwise. My underlying sight debilitates, covered in urticating blisters, due to the mustard gas harbouring my lungs. Instantaneously, it hit me. I am declining and my astray recollections begin to reminisce. The laughter that I shared with my school friends that brought such warming and welcoming hue: now gone. The delicate but scrawny fingers of my father that interweaved through my ruffled hair every morning: now gone. The rushing adrenaline before leaving for vacation: now gone. I share one more trembling breath. I am now gone.
I felt solitary.