The Bell Chime

by Mona Kabbani

I want to know. I want to read it over and over and over and over. I want it close but as far away from me as possible.

This feels like how i'll feel about this genre

Her fingers fly across the keys, a composition exploding in her skull, and if she doesn’t transcribe it fast enough it will crack open her mind and her brain will pour out all over the walls.

as though he is poisoned by his unconditional love. Yet this garden does not die from the poison. It only grows. Even as she sits unresponsive before him. As though he doesn’t see that she isn’t truly there. As though he sees her for what she can become.

She wants him, but her soul is leaking from her body. He wants what’s best and she wants his perfection to seed into her. Ground its roots into her bones, break her and remold her and sprout branches of exquisiteness until she is consumed. Until there is nothing left of her.

“Doctor?” she asks. He looks at her. “What made me so sad?” He sighs, a frown of pure sympathy and pity shadowing his face. “I don’t know, my dear. But I’d like to make it better.”

She shakes her head, trying to dislodge the thoughts from her skull brick by brick. The anxiety prods at her like a bunch of dark demons trying to drag her to Hell. She won’t miss out on a good time because of them.

Seeing him like this, now, brings her so much pain. Watching someone she loves forced to exist within the constricted thickness of a single sheet of paper. Whittled down to nothing but a photograph, stretched and cropped and shaped around four thick borders.

But what good is a future if you don’t want to live in it?

and it suddenly feels good to be so invisible. To have spent her life trying to hide behind the framework of reality only to realize she could let the insanity loose and no one would bat an eye. No one would care.

Those who would watch her on any other day avert their gaze. Because no one likes to acknowledge someone in pain.

The train halts at her stop but she doesn’t get off. Something holds her down. Or rather, there is nothing there to move her forward.

Is there a special place for those who vanish? Purgatory for people balancing on the fine line between life and death? A Schrödinger’s box for lost souls?

“I just . . . well, you’ve been in front of my building for the past three hours, and you see, I’m a doctor. I wanted to . . . I wanted to make sure you were still alive.” “I’m not,” she says. She isn’t sure why she said it so quickly, but suddenly nothing has ever felt more true. She’s been dead for a year.

He wanted her secluded so he could get under her skin. Know her better. Get inside her head and see just how deep the chaos went.

“Are you happy?” She looked at him. The laughter of watching a couple of kids wobble down the boardwalk left her face. “No,” she replied. He read her eyes and smiled. She smiled back. “Me neither.”

He wondered so deeply that as much as he wanted to be attached to her by the skin of their souls, he wondered if they could ever survive each other.

Yet he is the reason for it all. The reason Lauren bloomed and the reason she will evidently wither. His disappearance ruined all that he built, though he never realized he was the architect. Even in his absence, he still brought about destruction.

He felt he was giving her pieces of what she loved the most to hold. Too bad he never realized that he was the only one she wanted to hold.

What he actually had was a crushed bud. It had been big and green and hiding life, waiting for the perfect moment to open up to the world. Now it had a hole in its side, presumably from where Dylan punctured it with his thick index finger while yanking it from its stem. It oozed like a big sore filled with pus. It was supposed to grow up to be vibrant and beautiful.

This is how i feel right now

“No, really. It’s gorgeous. It’s just that . . . everything looks so delicate.” “Yeah. That’s the point.” “Huh?” “The fragility. Everything is effective yet so easily breakable.” Her eyes filled with the thought. The juxtaposition that flew right over Dylan’s head. The same contrast that made him nervous. His hands were too big to hold anything in this room.

Taking pills became symbolic after that. A way of showing she trusted him to see what helped her gears turn in normalcy. That she wasn’t right at her foundation. Exposed down to the bare mind.

The café was beautiful. He truly believed that. But he was honest with himself and in that honesty, he realized he didn’t belong in something so perfect.

“You have a lot of holes to fill, Lauren. A lot of holes, indeed.” “They used to be filled. A year ago. I was paved not to perfection but enough so you could hardly see the cracks.”

The higher up they travel, the louder the beat gets. Lauren feels like she’s entering a living thing. Something that will swallow her whole.