The Cage

      She's tired and stressed, as the clock on her bedside table is striking midnight on a Wednesday night in winter. She hates that clock, she thinks distantly, with its smooth black surface and blinking emerald numbers. It occurs to her that she used to like it, before this year. Before she found out just how demanding life could be. Before she realized that the universe doesn't give a damn about her or anyone. It just spins along, unassuming and unhurried. It knows that it will still remain, when all the people scurrying around just to get to a place they don't even want to go to have died off.



      The clock that annoys her so much and reminds her so strongly of the universe does not just mark the many hours that have passed since she sat down in her little darkened bedroom, staring at a computer screen and musing on life, love, and cosmic forces. No, it marks the minutes and seconds that have passed since the worries have reared their ugly little heads. All the minor concerns that she doesn't have time to think about during the day appear in this between-place of day and night, waving their tiny red pitchforks and dancing around her mind, and it takes all of her will to push them back down into the cage inside her soul that contains them. It is not a very structurally sound cage. It was once, when she was still innocent of everything, still naive about the horrors of the world around her. Time has rusted that cage, until it can barely withstand the strain she herself places on it. It's made out of half-truths, painful lessons learned, and advice from the back of cereal boxes. It's frayed and strained in some areas, and it's a miracle it still holds. She likes to think it's her own self that holds it together, but the truth is, she just doesn't have time to acknowledge her fears. Life is passing by in a maelstrom of everyday occurrences and "what ifs?" that plague her every waking thought.



      She faintly acknowledges that she should be sleeping, as the incessant blinking of her once beloved clock delights in reminding her, but she can't find it in her to rest. The next day will just bring new worries that the cage will have to hold. One day, she thinks, that cage is going to break. She wonders briefly if she's strong enough to repair it, when the time comes. She knows she isn't, not yet. That strength won't come until she is out of that small bedroom and living the life she wants. Right now, the life she lives feels more like a restriction, like something she has to do, instead of something she desires to do. She wonders what that says about her, in that moment of twilight weakness, when the fears converge and she can't find the strength to push them back. It will always be a losing battle, so long as the dreams that come in her sleep are simply that, dreams. One day, the battle will be won, but years will have to pass before she gathers enough steel bars and iron nails to hammer that cage back into one piece. But by then, she will no longer have need of the cage. She will be in control her own life and able to fight her own wars, when they start, instead of trying to push the little devils in her head back inside a rusted cage. Still, she thinks sleepily, finally shutting down the computer and succumbing to the comforting coolness of her dark blue sheets, it's better to live with a rusted cage, than to live in a gilded one.