Corridor Containment

An imaginative composed by Brayden (Year 12 Advanced English, MacKillop Catholic College)

He doesn’t begin with a sentence so much as a rupture.

One moment the corridor is ordinary- lockers clanging, fluorescent lights humming, the tired shuffle of bodies moving between periods- and the next, he is there, pacing a narrow groove into the flooring, words spilling from him in hot, frantic bursts. Not speaking exactly, but burning. His voice keeps catching speed, as though the thoughts inside him arrive faster than his mouth can survive them.

“I'm telling you, it's not enough to just, just SIT THERE and let it happen. People do that, they just let life go past them like they’ve got ALL the time in the world, but they don’t, they never do… and then one day they wake up and it's gone and they’ve done nothing with it.. and , and, and.”

He only stops long enough to inhale, sharp and shallow, before his hands are moving again, carving the air into pieces. I stand with my shoulder against the lockers and watch him set himself alight in real time. There is something almost electric in the way he talks, as if every word is being dragged from the centre of him with too much force. He doesn’t wait for permission, or reaction or even breath. He just keeps going, driven by a kind of urgency that seems less like confidence than desperation. His eyes are bright with it, not calm, nor rational, but feverish, as if he has looked too long at something blazing and can no longer see in ordinary light.

“I mean, why would anyone choose this?” he says, throwing a hand at a corridor, at the timetable, and the rehearsed smallness of everything that surrounds him. “Why would you decide that THIS is enough?”

No one answers. A few people have slowed now, pretending not to listen, their faces tilted in the cautious way that people look at a fire that they’re not sure is contained. He starts again, faster this time, words colliding and sparking against each other.

“There has to be more than this. There can't not be. There's absolutely zero chance that you can only want one thing and just stop there… That's the problem, isn't it? Everyone wants safety, wants neat little endings, wants everything labelled and in boxes, but I want all of it. I want to say yes to everything BEFORE it disappears.”

For a second the corridor seemed to lean in.

Even the fluorescent lights above seem harsher, whiter, as though they have been turned up to match him. He is no longer pacing but orbiting himself, /trapped inside/ the heat of his own wanting. The words come thicker now, more urgent, 

And he still cannot stop.

“I could leave,” he states suddenly, “Not forever. Maybe forever. That's the point, maybe it has to be that way. Maybe if you stay, you shrink.” His mouth twists around the last word as though it tastes sour. “One of the quiet ones.”

He sees me studying him, then properly, as though I might have something to steady him with. His face is flushed, his hair stuck to his forehead. His breathing, heavy. For a moment there is a crack in the performance of it all, and I glimpse what must be underneath:

Not confidence

Not madness

But an unbearable hunger. The kind that does not ask whether it should be fed.

“Don’t you ever feel it?” he asks. His voice hasnow sounding rough around the edges.                                                                dropped,                                                                        

“Like everything is happening at once and you’re the only one awake enough to notice?”

I don't answer. I don't think he wants one. I think he wants confirmation that he is not alone in his burning. He turns away before I can give him anything at all. His speech gathers speed again,

but now it has changed s

                                                  h

                                                    a

                                                     p

                                                      e.

“I can feel it everyday. In class. On the bus. At home, like there's this whole other life underneath everything, waiting. I can hear it calling to me, pulling at me.”

His mouth closes mid thought. The force in his body seems to f-a-l-t-e-r, not disappear, but flicker. He looks around as if the corridor has just returned to him, like has been standing too close to something bright enough to blind. For the first time he looks young. Not wild, not brilliant. Just…tired.

The silence that follows carries an emptiness. It is charged, still humming with everything he has thrown into it. The people who are watching begin moving at a normal pace again, relieved by the return of normal life.

He stays where he is.

His fingers open and close at his sides as though they have not yet accepted the absence of movement. Then, very quietly, he says “I just didn’t want to die having only ever been careful.”

It is not said for drama. That is what makes it worse.

I look at him, at the trembling brightness of him, the wreckage of all that wanting, and finally understand that his madness wasn’t random.

It was appetite

It was terror

It was the kind of living that tries to consume the whole sky before it’s forced out.

He was already walking away when I realised that I had been holding my breath.