God Poked Girl

“Here, there is no curtain to hide behind.”

The curtain unraveled, fraying its rich texture into appendages of indistinguishable mass that tore away at my skin. I screamed, but no sound arrived to my ears. There was no air to carry it, no lungs to expel it.

Blue. Grey. Green. Yellow. Orange. Pink. Grey. Black. Blue. Green. Purple. White. Red. Red. Blue. Red.

Chromatic aberrations seized my field of view, perishing each time I went to blink. Except blinking was no longer a physical act. Each flicker of perception captured a new impractical palette.

Each hue and tone quickly infiltrated my being. I could feel their eyes wriggling around in my mind, seemingly searching for the collective consciousness of a million forgotten moments.

“The blue of the polyester on my shirt, chafing and cheap. The grey of the rain-slicked concrete on the walk home. The green of the ‘We’re Closed’ sign, bleeding into a puddle. The yellow of the warning line on the platform. The red warmth that blooms on my arm, so beautiful.”

The appendages receded, replaced by currents that tugged at the edges of my essence, threatening to turn me inside out, to expose every raw nerve, every forgotten failure and hollow triumph to an uncaring cosmos.

Each facet of my ego, every mask I had ever worn, was stripped away and evacuated, flowing from me in a torrent of sensation.

I tried to cup my memories in my hands, to hold onto something, anything, that was mine, but they slipped through like water. I was no longer a body, but a locus of awareness floating in a borderless ocean.

The actress. The retail worker. The child. The survivor. They fled from me, their distinct forms blurring, becoming mere colours and temperatures in a shared ocean of human experience.

The sharp sting of a scraped knee from a child who fell off his bike.The bitter coffee on the tongue of an office worker pulling an all-nighter. The profound ache of an old man’s loneliness as he looked at a photograph of his late wife.

Their joys, their sorrows, their excruciating banalities wash over me, through me, threatening to drown the flickering ember of my own self. This was the end of the individual, a great and terrible merging.

The ballet of aberrations and borrowed sensations slowed. The turmoil left behind a vast, shimmering expanse where hues bled into one another, not like paint on a canvas, but like a celestial bruise. It was a sea of liquid consciousness, and I was a single, dissolving drop.

In the centre of this formless void, an awareness, cool and clear amidst the riot of feeling, exposed itself to me. No figure emerged from its actuality, yet its presence was absolute.

No greeting was exchanged. This thing need not know anything of hurried footsteps or tired faces, the monotony of a closing shift or the solace of a cold, desperate blade; for it commanded a presence of far greater experience.

“Why?”

The question was simple and absolute. It wasn’t accusatory or curious, but primordial. It resonated in the marrow of my soul. There was no room for lies, no space for the well-rehearsed deflections I usually employed. The truth was compulsive.

“Because living hurts, I didn’t have the will to bear it.” The words formed themselves without conscious effort.

Vignettes, acute and unwanted, flashed around me. The sympathetic but pitying smile of my old theatre director. The subtle rustle of my co-workers turning their backs to whisper when they thought I wasn't listening. The reflection in the train window, of a stranger I saw every day but never spoke to.

Then, a new image, one I fought with every fibre of my remaining being to keep buried: smoke, thick and black, pouring from the wings of the stage. The heat, the rising symphony of screams, the smell of burning velvet, and something sickeningly, unforgettably sweet.

“But it was yours to bear. The weight was not the world’s. What did you seek to gain from your respite of will?”

“A Calm Mind.” I answered immediately. The colours flashed a flagrant red.

“You did not want to be calm. You wanted the pain to mean something.” The colours swirled,

“Calm is the absence of feeling. You gorge yourself on the second-hand emotions of strangers because your own are too terrifying to acknowledge.”

“That’s not a fair judgement!” I tried to protest, to muster some indignation, but the words evaporated into their own shameful shade.

“Isn’t it?”

I am standing on the train platform again, the textured yellow line beneath my worn shoes. The wind of the approaching express tore at my clothes.

“You seek grand, theatrical endings. The train, the blade. But when the moment comes, you flinch. Not from a sudden love of life. But because the thought of judgment over your pathetic heap on the ground was more horrifying than death itself. Your ego is not broken, it is simply fragile and vain.”

The image of the theatre intensified. The heat was real. The screams were not a distant chorus; they were individual voices. Friends. Family. People who had come to see me perform. I can see the director clasping at his throat as his face contorts in terror.

I felt the paralysis that had seized me on stage, my feet nailed to the floorboards, the director’s words "The show must go on" becoming a mantra of inaction as the real world burned around me.

“I was petrified.” I couldn’t move then and I can’t move now.

“A child’s fear is understandable,” the voice conceded, a flicker of something that might have been reason before it sharpened again.

“But you are no longer a child. Fear is a condition of living. You choose to make it your identity. You define yourself by the one moment your body failed you, building a prison of routine and petty miseries to keep you from ever having to risk anything again. Every monotonous shift, every avoided gaze, every silent train ride. You did not seek calm. You sought numbness and You sought the final curtain without ever having to finish your performance.”

“What was I supposed to do?” The question was a sob, a fissure in the dam of my composure. “Forget them? Act like it never happened? Move on?”

“No.” the voice retorted, the word echoing with the weight of a profound, missed truth.

“You were supposed to honour them. Honour them by living. By being brave enough to feel the agony of their loss. By being strong enough to risk pain for the chance of joy. An actress’ life is to feel, to connect, to channel emotion into something meaningful. But when faced with true, world-shattering emotion, you froze. The stage burned, the curtain fell, and you were left hollow, playing the part of a ghost in your own life.”

The voice softened, losing its honed, analytical edge. For the first time, it felt less like an interrogator and more like an intimate, pleading part of myself.

“So, I ask again. What did you seek to gain from your respite of will?”

The question hung in the vast emptiness. The chaos around me stilled. The riot of shared consciousness withdrew.

“I want a chance to be better.” The answer came, clear and keen, a real compulsion. It cut through me like lightning.

“I want to go back.” I clarified, the thoughts tumbling out, raw and unfiltered.

“Not to that night,not to the fire. I… I want a chance to be brave. To make a choice that matters. I want to feel the weight of a decision in my hands and not crumble. I want my actions to mean something more than a restocked shelf or a clean floor. I want to save someone. Not for applause, not for an audience, but because it’s the right thing to do. I want to right a wrong. I don't want to just be the girl who survived, I want to be the girl who deserved to.”

The vast, colourful sea drained away into a single point of blinding, pure white light.

I saw a reflection in the diminishing void. It was my face, but younger, clearer. Her expression wasn't angry or judgmental. It wasn’t even sad. It was... relieved. As if a great weight had finally been lifted. An understanding passed between us, between the me I was and the me I could have been.

Her lips formed a single, soundless word.

“Thank you.”

A jarring rush of sensation returns to my entire being. Beneath my cheek, cool, soft grass. On my fingertips, damp earth, crushed leaves. The gentle warmth of sunlight filters through a green canopy, dappling my eyelids open.