The impossible; R. Bürki

Impossible

The image of a destroyed body: bruises, scraped knees, cuts, blood, enormous eye-bags and sickly skin.

Who was that? What was that?

A mirage, perhaps; what her tired eyes were showing her to make fun of the poor girl. Something unreal, something so much different from reality.

And maybe even the heinous leg pain was simply a joke. Like the tears that fell down from her bloodshot eyes and all the dried blood on her wrecked knees.
Her feet frozen by the pain, unable to hold up the girl's body.
Her skinned hands all dirty with mud.
Her pale face, the grass between her messy hair and on her face.

Right?

However, if it was so, then why, with every second passing by, the person that she saw on the mirror looked more and more real? Why, with minutes passing by, she felt always more pain everywhere?

Edel felt the world crumble down on her shoulders, while she abandoned herself on the bench behind her back.

"What am I doing?" a feeble whisper, real only in her head.

Such a quiet and anonymous whisper that it couldn't even be heard, in that chaos that the girl's mind was.

"You're destroying yourself" a cry – this time – answered the question.

And, God, did she hear that.

Edel locked her lids as much as she could, covered her face with the hands and snuggled on the large wooden bench; trying to get as small as possible, so that she couldn't be found by the horrible monster that was looking for her: the desire to quit everything.

Edel didn't want to - in the deep of her heart she knew it - but the image that not long before the mirror showed her made the girl see reality with a different pair of glasses; clearer and much more real.

Why couldn't she just let go? Why didn't she just give up? That was what everyone wanted, so why didn't she please them?

You're not good enough. You don't even put some effort in what you do. You have no talent. I'm just losing my time; we already know you're never going to make it. Just stop trying, you're going nowhere, we know that.

The voices of all her coaches and teammates crowded her thoughts and blurred her mind. The same voices that, until that day, had pushed her to carry on and show them that they were wrong.

However, in that moment, the only thing that she could think was that maybe they weren't wrong; maybe she was the one who needed to think about that twice.
Maybe they were right.
God, who was she trying to fool? They were so goddamit much right.

A sob left her half-closed lips, and another followed this first one. Tears had started to pour out form her eyes and her temples to pulse all over again.

It didn't take long: Edel started feeling suffocated, as if she were drowning.
Drowning in the ocean of impossible; where all her dreams were swimming.
The ocean that she had believed her friend for all her life, but that in that moment was dragging her to the bottom, whispering in her ear the same word, endlessly.

"Impossible, impossible, impossible."