𝐂𝐇𝐑𝐘𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒 | #Panic Contest

𝐂𝐇𝐑𝐘𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒

"You can do this," my mother said to me, gripping my hand tightly. Her eyes shone with a mixture of emotions that I didn't have the chance to decipher because following her words, a helmet was placed over my head that devoured my vision. There was no screen to see through, but I wouldn't need light where I was going.

My eyes blinked repeatedly as they tried to adjust to the darkness and I felt a set of hands on either side of me guide me down into a dirt hole that was about three feet deep. Once my back was pressed firmly into the earth, it began.

The first shovelful of dirt was the hardest.

I knew it was coming, but it still took me by surprise. Perhaps I wasn't prepared for how cold it would be. Or perhaps I wasn't ready for the reality it brought.

As the hole continued to fill around me and then over me, I could feel my lungs fill with air from the canisters attached to the helmet. There was just enough for the six hours I was supposed to spend submerged beneath the dirt, but at the rate my anxiety was consuming oxygen, I feared that they might unearth a corpse when the time was up.

My mind tried to latch onto the script I had been feeding it for the past week in order to cope with the coming burial, but the words jumbled themselves into something unrecognizable. Why was I here? A metaphor? A metamorphosis?

Somewhere above the dirt, my friends and family were waiting for me to emerge. Or rather, some form of me. It was the first full moon after my seventeenth birthday, which is an important celebration for my people. The dirt on our island is a closely guarded secret; it teems with properties unlike anything else found on the planet, giving life to flora and fauna you couldn't imagine even if you tried. And under the beams of a full moon, it becomes...transformative.

Buried in the dirt chrysalis, I could feel the transformation begin.

And that's what scared me the most. Being entombed in the earth was nothing compared to the thought of what would be dug up. Would it still be me, or would it be something unrecognizable? Would it be something I could be proud of, or something I feared? Would it win the love and respect of my friends and family?

I could cry. I could shout. I could beg for them to free me from my dirt-filled dungeon before the change overtook me. But a single thought stilled my screams:

"You can do this."