Prompt 1 (Anxiety): If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

There is no escape from the sound, I say to myself. Sound of my never-ending thoughts. The sound of it is so loud that it is even slightly possible to capsulate all of it and put it on a record. If it was on a jukebox, it probably would not sound right. It can not sound right but only glitches almost all the time, the disturbing sound filling your room. I could not leave it, for a while. Then, I just broke the lock and got away.

The sound doesn't leave me even if I thought I escaped it. That's why I just couldn't put on upbeat music to make it all a breath of fresh air when I just can't seem to figure out why I am leaving a promising future. For a long time, landing my attention, on the same point on the horizon, driving the car doesn't feel like a hard thing to do. It almost feels like the right thing, at the right time. These are my rules, I say, the sweetness and the bitterness of growing up. Finally. If my future self would come and tell me, to stop, and come back to where I was before, would I still listen to her voice, or ignore her and step on the gas even stronger? Maybe she wouldn't even try to speak out about her mistakes, I think, try and see yourself. Drive until you are stuck in the mud.

In one of my English classes, they gave us a piece of paper and wanted us to write down, and answer a simple question. "If you could go anywhere, where would you go?" It was probably for our creativity to bloom all of a sudden. I shouldn't have taken it so seriously, but here I am, in my car, in the middle of a forest, chasing down pathways without stopping for a single moment. It sparked an idea, too late to unfollow it. I said, I shouldn't have stayed there in the first place, and now I don't know where I am going. I just know the existence of a worn-out paper in the back of my car, leading me to the shores. The place where the sea and the sky meet, where I catch glimpses of it as the woods clear out a little on my way, to myself.

The view is clearer now, I am so close to the water. Strange, how once the sky seemed clear to some, my eyes failed their mission every time I waited to see a reflection of the truth. My wrongs and my rights, all are coming at once. But it is different now, it will be. I stopped the car engine, took out the key, and got out just to feel the sand beneath my sore feet. Approach the sea as it washed the seaweed from the shore, and stayed behind the waves, without delving into it. In between is where peace makes home in my mind, seek to stay there as long as I lock my feet and store it all in my memory, erasing to make room.

Paper in my hand, I am walking to what seems like there is no end to the coast, perpetual. My feet dragged with the spell the shore got me in, wet, leaving traces to be washed out later. I never filled out the paper, too scared to see a plan, an addictive layout of chronological, once will-be, discrepancies of the future past, emerging behind the whiteness. As if a phantom flies high and high, till I lose sight of it. Here I am, feeling like the waves, only this sound is living right now, in me. Peace of it all.

I look at the horizon again, it doesn't seem blurry anymore. I started to run. Leave the car behind, and get away from what seems to belong in another life. Don't care if my chest lifts itself up and down so fast, the swiftness of the beat of my heart. I run.

This plan, this silent plan, was never part of me.

Until now.

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Feeling: Anxiety, mixed with terrified.

The short piece you read was the run-away chapter of our character, someone I found myself in similar. No, I didn’t run away from home physically but psychologically. For the last three years, I often felt like I was not enough for anything in my life, like for my friends, my school or my environment, even for my dreams. I am slowly trying to accept the feeling and move on with it, then another insecurity caught me in my spot. It was the feeling of insecurity in the world. I feel like I can’t be secure anywhere in the world, there is war, and guns and crime everywhere. It was a dreadful feeling for me while I was reeling though the streets of my city, jubilant night life and people I can’t trust. Of course, because of the anxious feeling, I was exaggerating scenarios in my head. As if I was going to be killed in any second by a made-up killer in my mind. Even though the thought would not be real, my feeling made me think the whole thing was real.

That’s what feelings do to us. As you grow older from a young age, you start to realize its sheer impact. I really wanted to escape it but I didn’t know how to. Then, this story aligned with me and it felt good writing it. Escaping it a little but still carrying it, inviting other possible feelings when you transport your body to somewhere entirely different. Being horrified due to insecurities transforms into peace and excitement. The shore waves finally reach the heart.

If you are someone who wants to escape the real world a bit and want to go to a place you desire, this piece is for you. This is my very first attempt to create a world for specific feelings, I think I will go for it. To me, everyone can benefit from this, from art and literature. Our feelings change everyday and as someone who is interested in studying psychology at its core and a young person with an old mind, it is 20 years older than her physical body, there is a long way to go to explore my feelings with a deep understanding. With stories, with essays and sometimes matching it with music. In the end, after writing it over and over, the feeling will not be complicated as it was in the first place. We can finally get over it and see how to deal with it if it comes back to us.

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” -Sylvia Plath