That One Night
Epigraph:…I felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a drowning sensation, as if I had toppled overboard and was being swept away by the silver waves." (55)Under the urban sky, I saw the evening sun blushing one last time, while lowering beneath the fading horizon. I was relieved. At least that was what I hoped to be. But within me there was a subconscious chaos that I held with disregard for the last few years. Every time it made a daring move, I felt a pain urging to escape my taut crown. I came to experience this inconvenient urge as hope made a damning fall to the ground one night.

Like every other day, I was planning to sleep early, around late 10:00 PM. Aside from the clicking noises generated by the clock, my turbulent heart throbbed so violently that it was difficult for me to properly close my eyes. In desperation, I tried to empty my head by hitting it down towards the puffy, white pillow underneath repeatedly like waste being thrown out of a plastic trashcan. To fathom this unexplainable happening, I declared every action I made, every word I spoke, and every idea I thought of in the past as wrong decisions. I felt the heat of mortification accumulate over my tiresome brain. I then accepted my countless misdeeds with a reticent acquiescence.

“If only all of this was part of a bad dream,” I silently spoke to myself, as I peered through the voiceless ceiling above. “I could have become more successful, more proactive, and more…alive.”

But no way this was possible. I was trapped in a complex labyrinth with infinite passageways and dead ends. Where was I going? I didn’t know. What kind of fate will I meet at the very end of my life? I felt as if an inexperienced, young sailor was caught in a deadly winter storm in the middle of a long-forgotten sea, cut from all lifelines. I desperately called for help. But no one came. Not even God.

Then the boat capsized. Losing my composure, I was deserted in the middle of nowhere.

Suddenly tears started to melt all over my face, falling hard below the deep, blue ocean like warm snow. Quietly I wailed again, and again, and again. Nothing was here for me, I thought. There was no exit—no way I could survive this.

If only at this very moment I woke up from this terrible “dream” and saw next pure happiness and endless hope, fate uncrowned and melancholy begone, I can move forward. To a utopian reality, that is. I can reconcile with my family and spend times of exuberance with my school friends.

“Anything could’ve been much better than this,” I thought once more.

But too bad, what a pity. How can I change something that has already happened in the past? How can I be so sure about a future I unknowingly made? All I see are grey droplets falling from a dry, blue sky. Maybe something else can help me escape. I stared at the empty ceiling once again. There was nothing but a black hole that recreated an ultimatum of universal destruction.
Simply said, an endless pit.

“That’s who I am,” I whispered to my ear.
Nothing.

But something certainly was going on within me. I only hid the unbearable truth before the eyes of my family members and school friends. I considered this as an act of rectitude.

But I can’t bear it anymore.

I can’t.