The Noise Box
written by: Salsabil Ashraf
There’s so much noise inside me
So loud it is, that it drowns out the rest of my thoughts and ideas
There’s a faint humming I keep feeling in my chest
I looked down and found nothing to leave me in distress, but the humming grew louder – and I could feel it in my bloodstream, spreading like venom.
So, it was decided. I will open my chest to take a look at what’s inside. Be it that I’ll have to tear my own skin and rip it off to see what is, in fact, the source of all my sorrow and stress.
The sounds grew louder and louder every day, as I put off hurting myself like that. But I woke up one day to find that there were blue blotches all over my skin.
My skin was so pale, a dull yellow on one side, and on the other, the blue was taking over. I decided then that it was time for me to break into my own chest.
I stood before the mirror and looked at my reflection in it. I looked at my face, my features – I looked at my eyes. I stared at myself in the mirror; those eyes, I know them so well. I know what dread, fear, guilt, and sadness look like in them. I know it so well.
…
My blunt nails were covered in blood, with tiny pieces of my own skin lying beneath them.
The pain almost had me pass out, but I insisted on seeing what had been causing me to feel so miserable both alone and amidst the crowds.
Red and a pulsing pink, with purplish blue veins branching out like the roots of an old tree, built and forgotten about
Behind the pink-stained-white-ivory that made my ribs.
The heart and lungs were not what caught my attention; everyone carries the two in their chests. Nothing is special about this.
The “music” I was hearing came from a rectangular box that stood right behind my sternum. It was made of glass with rain pelting on its inside. Falling over a hundred different words and actions that hurt me. Wounded me so deep it left my brain and lodged itself deep inside a box inside my chest.
The music and the sounds, I realised, were the moans of pain escaping through the slight openings in the box’s seal.
Groans and moans reverberating against the walls of my chest, and suddenly, the defeated look I always see in my eyes made so much sense to me.
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