Home...
My Sanity...
School...
My Mental Physical or just to say both...
Repeat the cycle of control and the cage of the life that you're were born into and the physical beat down.
The clock on the wall ticked like a slow death march.
Each second was a hammer striking his skull—steady, deliberate, cruel.
Ron sat at his desk, the glow of the desk lamp casting long shadows across his cluttered textbooks. Biology, Chemistry, Human Anatomy... a lineup of tombs rather than books, each one a brick in the prison wall built around his life like was being tied in steel chains.
He hadn't opened them in hours.
His pen lay dry beside a blank worksheet. His mind wandered, lost in a fog that never lifted just waiting to hear everything.
Downstairs, the muffled voices of his parents rose like static through the floorboards with a disappointing tone in the air that spread in the room.
"Did you see his midterm grades?"
"Not enough. He's falling behind."
"He's lazy. If we don't push him now, he'll ruin his future."
Ron's jaw clenched.
Future. That word again. Back to back again.
Nevertheless the word that called his future. His life. Like being chained ready to choose not his choice of life but them.
A word that never belonged to him. A future that had already been drawn, colored, framed, and hung on the wall—without ever asking what he wanted a completd artwork.
Doctor. Surgeon. Scholar.
Success...
Perfection...
Obedience...
He reached up and touched his chest, feeling the dull ache buried beneath the ribs. It had been there for years—a silent, invisible wound that never healed just taking all the pain of the words of control force in a color that the image of him was complete like a work of art.
Every morning, he wore the mask. Every evening, he peeled it off just to remember what his real face looked like. And now… even that face was starting to blur and blurrer the identity that he wish to make his own art was destroyed from the beginning.
He stood and moved to the window, staring out at the cold night.
His reflection stared back.
Dark circles under his eyes. A hollow gaze. A body that had grown taller, older, but never freer.
Across the street, a house lit up with laughter—shadows dancing behind glowing curtains. A family. Smiling. Happy.
Ron didn't remember the last time he'd heard someone laugh in this house was only silent and pressure of disappointment.
He turned away.
The belt hung from the ceiling fan, tied and tightened, waiting. He'd done it quietly, methodically. Not in a fit of rage or despair. Just… tiredness. A deep, numbing exhaustion that no sleep could cure but another way called death or his freedom.
He looked at it for a long time.
It didn't scare him anymore.
What scared him… was how easy it felt. How logical and how in conception he sees it. As if this were the only way to finally make a decision for himself his choice that not being controlled or forced.
But just as he stepped closer, something broke.
Not in the room. Not in the house.
In him.
He gasped, stumbled back, collapsing into the chair behind him. The tears didn't come, but the breathless shaking did heart beating from the breath of loosing airflow.
I don't want to die, he thought. I just… don't want to live like this. I just want to make my road my deception of life my way on living.
That thought hit harder than any insult, any punishment, any slap of reality.
He closed his eyes, hands trembling, heart pounding so fast it hurt. And for the first time in months, he whispered a single, fragile word in his voice:
"Help."
No one answered only the rain starts.
But something changed.
Somewhere in the darkness of his mind, a door creaked open like something destroyed it like it was a feeling just a feeling of destroying your darkness trying to replace it with light or just a candle but it doesn't felt like hope.
Not of hope—but of awareness. Of the quiet decision to survive tonight his decision that he chooses himself not to die.
Not for a dream. Not for a goal.
Just for the possibility that tomorrow might be… different. Maybe new or just back in the cycle but it's a possibility that something might change his life.
He let out a shaky laugh, dry and bitter. He laid on the bed and stared at the ceiling, still breathing. Still here. Still existing. Still watching. Still thinking.
He didn't know how many more nights he could take.
But he would give tomorrow one more chance.
---
That night, his dreams came.
They weren't gentle like something hates him for existing.
He found himself trapped inside a cage of black iron—no walls, no floor, no sky. Just endless void stretching in every direction. The bars weren't made of metal, but of words—echoing voices from his life, looping like curses.
"You're not trying hard enough."
"Stop embarrassing us."
"You were supposed to be special."
"You're worthless."
He screamed, punched the bars, tore at the ground that didn't exist—but the cage didn't budge. It was part of him. It was him. It was he's soul.
And then, the world pulsed.
A strange tremor rippled through the dream, shaking the void. Ron dropped to his knees, panting, as something shifted beyond the horizon of his mind.
A whisper echoed—not from the voices, not from the cage.
From something older. Deeper.
It said nothing, but he felt it.
A presence.
Something watching him.
No, not just watching.
Waiting.
---
Ron sat up in bed with a start. His skin was damp with sweat, the sheets tangled around his legs. The air felt thick—wrong somehow. He reached for his phone.
3:33 a.m.
The world was quiet again.
Too quiet.
He got up, looked out the window.
Something in the sky pulsed faintly, then vanished—like a heartbeat from the stars. But when he blinked, it was gone.
Maybe it was just a dream.
Maybe it was nothing.
But deep down, somewhere in that wounded part of himself he had almost forgotten, a thought lingered:
Something's coming.
And tomorrow may not be what he expected.
Ron signed to face his life today thinking back to the physical in the school.