Sinking Stress
Sinking Stress is a short story written by Bodmin Moor College student Alexandra Vyvyan in collaboration with The Green Line series.
I wondered if anyone else noticed how pretty the sky was today, how the darkness was bright and soft all at once. I blinked, transforming the green leaves from the oak into molten bands of blue, turning to purple and pink. I felt the effects of gravity pulling my flailing body down through the murky liquid seeping rapidly into my veins. This sharp realization sent my brain into spasms and forced me to order my thoughts. Trying to remain calm, I named each colour, wishing I could change them.
I seemed to do this a lot. I often looked back on my life so far to see what I would change if I could. I’m not proud to say that each time I do this there seems to be more that I wish was different and yet still, I do nothing about it. For example, I never really talked to the quiet girl in the class until she moved away, and I never spent time with family when I had the chance. I hated thinking about these things, but it almost felt right that I did.
By this point, my subconscious mind had dragged each colour into ordered rows in the sky, starting with red. There is red in everything I do. To me, red represents fire and sensitivity, passion, and rage. Green reminds me of jealousy and ambition. Next came blue; blue was loyalty. One of the most important things in life. All these colours, very different but all tinted with the same thing. Grey. Grey is emotionless, dull, timeless. Grey is all that I saw some days. Some days where I was slumped at the back of the class praying I wouldn't be called on to no prevail. Some days where I woke up and everything seemed pointless. Some days where the grey was blinding me, drowning me and grasping at me whilst I tried to run with sticky feet.
Or in this case, the grey water that covered my eyes and began running through me as I gasped for the chance to see the sky one last time. The same sky that was full of fire all day, the orange of every wintry hearth keeping me going but now that I was at home staring at this textbook, I was drowning in the realization of reality. I stared up at the starless, moonless abyss searching for answers. That summer-fruit backdrop had changed to hues of blue, purple and then almost magenta, colours merging as if they were juice-mix dissolving in a glass of water or ink running off a page. I wished I could change it. The words stretching across this coloured canvas creating a soul-blackening applique to the explosion of stress behind it.
Normally, I wouldn’t have paid attention to the colours of everyday objects unless it was clothes, shoes or stationary but this was a welcome distraction, anything was, even if it was just the colours outside my bedroom window. I envisaged what I wanted to do at this moment, open the window as I had so many times before and reach out to grab the branches of the oak just outside, pull myself out of my room onto the burnt umber tree and escape from my thoughts into the night. Escape from this. But I couldn’t. Neither could most other people my age. All of us, forced into this, this wasn’t a choice that we made. This is just something that we have been destined to do from the day we were born with nothing we could do about it. A privilege or a curse, both a debate that we can’t join in on. I wish I could change it. An example of society devised by my mind that contained so much useless information, like the powerhouse of a cell or the quadratic formula. So many useless things that I would never use but would literally define me for the rest of my life. I am a number plotted on a graph, an item on a shelf waiting to be picked by someone wanting my work. That same someone would be able to decide the quality of my life providing I lived up to my numbers, or the label I will be given on results day.
It was back, the water, rising so quickly, choking me and swirling me up in this whirlpool of knowledge. I could see nothing clearly; numbers, equations, quotes, dates, points in time, people, opinions and everything else imaginable to a teenage girl like myself. The whirlpool was draining. I was too, but still, I had no way of changing it.
by Alexandra Vyvyan
About The Green Line
The Green Line is part of a third year collaborative project exploring our personal connection with the ongoing climate crisis. Over the next month we will be publishing a variety of pieces from the student community.
Find out more about The Green Line here.