FRACTURE

My coaching classes are almost three kilometers away from my father’s rented house. I walk there four days a week and walk back again, even though I have money in my wallet. It’s just… I think I’ve grown accustomed to the pain in my legs from walking straight for more than half an hour—sometimes more than forty minutes.

Everything around me seems to slow down while I’m walking. Every… thing… around me. And then, all of a sudden, it all begins to move faster, and faster, and faster.

Sometimes I hallucinate, and I become afraid that I’ll accidentally lose my way. I don’t know why, but most of the time, I find myself wanting to throw my useless body onto the highway. Maybe the horror of that rented house still follows me into the streets. Maybe the curse of unemployment still haunts me—wearing me down, killing me slowly, in an indirect way.

At night, all I see are bright streetlights and headlights flashing at the edge of my vision. All I hear is chaos—the kind of chaos that reminds me of that rented house.

The noise of the highway and the noise inside the house I live in have something in common—they both sound exactly the same to me.