Stranded

It was too hard to push uphill against the tide of indifference.

did this a lot, listening. I wasn’t sure for what exactly, maybe just to see what they said about me when I wasn’t there.

dropped my professional voice. ‘I am calm. I’m just disagreeing with you.

Zoe was laughing, not meanly, but like we were having fun together. I whipped up a large piece of bladder wrack and threw it at her, making her scream. I felt a stab of fear that she’d get pissed off, but she was grinning as she shrieked.

Intentional or not, they’d shaped and pruned me into something not quite right. Now they were gone, I’d never be able to talk to them about it. I’d missed my chance. All the things I could never say to them, could never ask, just bubbled away inside me, making me angrier and angrier.

It wasn’t that they were bad people, it was just exhausting trying to seem normal to them.

I blinked, surprised to be pulled so directly into their conversation. I’d been quite happy listening and watching the world scroll by.

My recent weight gain bloated my face like a toad. Had I not been blinking I might have looked dead.

I’d heard someone say once that ‘suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem’. I was willing to bet that person had not been trapped on an island with a murderer and no hope of escape.

If it was to be survival of the fittest, I would play to win.

that’s what nearly killed me then,’ I say, looking her in the eye and watching her instantly regret her words. ‘There’s this … compulsion, bred into us. To be polite, to be civilised, as if by ignoring a threat we’re somehow safe from whoever or whatever is out to get us.

Though, if I had known then what would follow, the escalation that was to come, I might not have slept at all.

Looking back, it almost makes me sick. To think how naïve I was to consider the building of the hut, together, as a sign of things to come.

I should have trusted my instincts.

there was something about him that made me feel like he wasn’t really listening when anyone else talked.

I had traded time with the two people I loved most for a job I hated and people who barely knew me.

It was instinct, and instinct isn’t clever. It’s not reasoned or logical. It’s just what your body tells you to do to keep it safe. Sometimes survival comes at the cost of pain – to you or someone else.

People assume that people they dislike are secretly revelling in their failures, and it’s not a huge leap to start thinking that they are causing you to fail.

You could tell with most people. Either they’d been bullied, or they’d been the one preying on someone else. There was a third kind, those that liked to watch, to laugh. Most people fell into that category in my experience. They liked to watch, as long as the bad things were happening to someone else.

Sometimes I’ve worked places where there are just … bullies. You grow up thinking that’s just playground stuff, but some people never grow out of it. They like throwing their weight around, having control over people. Especially in offices.

And “happy”, what is that exactly? There’s contentment, safety, comfort. But happiness? I don’t think it’s real,

Fortunately I have learned that there is no justice, aside from what we make for ourselves. There is only survival, and the victor tells the story.

The stars had been like a show just for me, a secret for those awake when the world slept.