Just one? Yikes. That's honestly too hard to pick, but here are a few of them from my different novels:
The endless hum of over-bright. LED. electric lights. sings in my ears like a chorus of skittish cicadas, fanning their wings, as if they’re desperate to escape. I can’t blame them. Trembling like a miniature earthquake. My body tries to make sense of this cataclysm that’s left my world seeing stars.
My head spins again, turning bodies topsy turvy. Smearing faces into the paint. Baptized with blood in the white space. I’m not even sure when I woke up or how long I’ve spent lying here, staring at the walls or the ceiling. My senses are all scrambled. Am I facing the left or the right? Am I hearing or feeling the voices crashing around me, a barrage of nervous wrecks? I swim in the excruciating sensation, almost blacking out. I feel as though I'm hanging from the rafters by my hair, and the pressure in my neck only increases with every crash of my heartbeat. My mouth defies me as I try to call for a nurse - my jaw is locked tight as if it’s been screwed shut and it's stubbornly set on staying that way for the moment. The whole thing fills. With bitter bile. I can’t swallow. And I try desperately not to drown before somebody finds me.
Whether we like it or not things are what they are.
I used to wish for a ‘real life,’ a ‘real family,’ a ‘real mother,’ a ‘real home,’ and ‘real’ peace. But that grouchy woman with the slurred speech, that little box with the slurred colors on the misprinted wallpaper, that cluster of colored bodies with slurs at the end of their tongues, this slurry of light places and heavy, of waking and sleeping, of dulled feeling and dulled senses and dulled want blurring together and smudging out my hand into something I can’t even bring into focus IS real.
Just objectively ugly.
It seems dichotomous, the things I’ve learned to crave. Silence when there is none. Human conversation when there is none beyond meals brought. Doors locked and unlocked. Passing shadows and whiffs of perfume in eternally empty hallways.
I would cry when they were staring at me.
I would cry when I slept through the unlocking of my room and went a day without seeing anyone at all.
