By Ouanessa Nana
I don’t think it’s a good time now. My breath cluttered in my chest. Now.
It severed me, cleaving through my lungs as I struggled to breathe through bleeding and bruised wounds. My hands were trembling as I scuffled back to my desk, the world melting away and my skin searing, the heat getting caught by my breath, the fractured shatters of my ribs closing in. I hadn’t noticed that the pencil in my hand snapped and I was carving markings on the wood of my desk, the shavings trickling to the floor in mounds like the pieces of my crumbling heart.
Here I was again, throwing myself into another situation where the odds were not in my favor, where the passion was all but a mirage blurring my vision, turning my pupils smoky red. My teacher tapped on my desk, the room dipped into darkness and my eyes flickered, the sweat on my arms sticking to the plastic of my chair.
The words coming from his mouth were unarguable and I blinked, my mouth dry, the air cutting up the insides of my mouth. I tried to speak, the force cutting the side of my mouth and lips. I wipe blood from my face, smearing it onto the stick of chalk handed to me by my professor.
This was not how it was supposed to go, this is not how the game was played. My knees were blemished, bent and disjointed as I crushed into the floor. My classmates gasp as I get up, my fingers barely able to hold to the chalk as I write the answer to my professor’s question onto the board.
I rasped, the sharp intake of breath mincing my throat with every slit of air. The panic swished in my stomach, the despair sinking its nails into my shoulders and I cried out. Someone called my name and I turned around to see my teacher, his crisp suit glinting in the bright light of the classroom, tapping his foot on the checkered ground, his arms crossed.
I swallowed our gazes synced, the pierced anger of my heart bursting through my skin and trickling in waves.
He shakes his head, grabbing the chalk from my hand and motioning for me to sit back down and my desk. I numbly obliged as his last comment scratches down the edges of my spine.
“You never learn do you? Here you are again, at your knees begging for vindication,”
And yet, it is never given to me.
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