She closed her eyes, teeth clenched together, her breathing shallow. She needed to calm down, to push the writhing energy inside her down, down, down, until it couldn’t hurt anyone else. She needed to be calm, cool, a fixed point. Not the storm.
She felt her heart thudding in her chest, much too quickly. She felt a buzzing in her head, like it was going to fly away from her body, from the feelings clogging her chest. That tight feeling gripping her heart, her lungs, crawling up her throat and pressing against her lips.
She would not break. She would not unleash her energy into an already overflowing world. She took a deep breath, then another. Breath first. She ignored the voice in her mind telling her to throw, break, scream into the world until it heard her. There was no use; she couldn’t change the world, even if her throat was raw from yelling and her muscles weak from breaking.
She squashed her anger, her pain, her grief, her frustration, her joy, her love, her happiness. She would be numb. She would be still. She would not feel. That is how she would survive.
© The Lightning Tower, 2020