Forbidden Daylight

• Alishba Sarwar, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2021

As the bright light entered the room, I took shelter under the cover, praying that this was just a dream. Boom! My greatest fear turned to reality as the bomb I had been dreading had gone off. I heard the booming sound and vibration in the distance. At that moment I reflected on my past. Every single day that had gone by. Had I not learnt anything? I accepted that this time was tough...Yes. I told myself I was smarter... Yes. I told my nerves to behave...Yes. But it was all futile. Despairing. Precisely hopeless...

I felt the burn, yet tried harder and harder to move. I sensed my spirit deflating, as I strained to budge, but fear inflated me once again. The same fear that had been pushing me for these many years. Just how could I let all my efforts go to waste and fall a step behind on this one frigid day. I told myself again and again and again to get out of my head and restart. Flush it all out and hit restart. But my mind kept drifting away. Drifting and drifting until it was brought back to consciousness by the booming, which got louder, ghastly and more atrocious every second that went by.

My mission began. My mind was at war. The sound unknowingly became my fiercest enemy, as I tried all remedies in my mind to conceal the blare out, and transpired to believe that it was nothing but a self-made illusion. That, however, was pure self-delusional thinking. There was no escape. There was only surrender. The faster I surrendered the faster the pain would fade like a memory, and be a non-existent chapter in my mind.

Tomorrow would be the same, as it had been in the past. The sacrifice had to be made. It had to be made every day. It's a lot easier said than done, but it had to be done as it was well worth the hassle. I promised myself I wouldn't complain and everything would be OK, but I was losing my mind... until I shifted my weary arm to the side of my bed, heaved my phone from my bedside table, and felt the comforting pleasure of slamming the snooze button. Oh, the comfort, the tranquilly, the serenity!!! Everything had been accomplished. My meeting with reality was postponed for another ten minutes.