The girl who couldn't cry: Chapter 6

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5


"Tell me why do you draw spirals again, Ari?" His look made her close her eyes as the throbbing sensation behind them threatened ever louder.

"Because it’s the only way I can cry, Dwayne" she said simply, her eyes shut tightly, willing back the violent surge of emotional intensity behind them. Dwayne stared at them for a moment, trying to understand, then he moved forward again and crouched down to carefully poke the finished drawing in amongst the other papers inside the portfolio. Once it was inside, Ari let the flap fall and she pushed it back under her cot quickly. Dwayne continued to crouch in front of her on the bed. Ari could feel how it was making his knees and ankles, back and neck hurt. He looked at her with his brown, round eyes and excessively aquiline nose. Dwayne said nothing, but Ari could hear his emotions like the shrieking of gulls roaring in her mind. “So? Why do you need to cry, Ari?”

The shooting pain inside Ari's head began to spin like one of her spirals. It was a pinwheel of light boring into her mind, the fiery tendrils spilling outwards to burn and frazzle the edges of her thoughts. "Don't!" she breathed. Dwayne put his fingers against her forehead in the hopeful attempt to cool her mind. The cool of his hands momentarily thwarted the spinning but then it came back again, stronger and more unavoidable. She lay down on the bed. "Kill me!" she whispered.

"No." Dwayne said as quietly.

"I want to cry Dwayne. I can't. My body refuses. I feel everything inside my mind but my body can't react or respond to it. I might as well be dead."

"Bit melodramatic Ari. Even for you."

"You sound like Margot! I'm being a 'baby' now am I?"

"You are in pain. We all of us are sweetie."

"You don't know the pain I feel every moment of my life!" she retaliated raising her voice now a little.

"True, but you only get a reflection of mine, you don't feel how my knees burn that clearly, especially at night when I am trying to sleep."

"Just go D. I'll be fine." she sighed, the spinning maelstrom of pain jettisoning electrical surges of intense heat throughout her head. Dwayne left the room. She could feel the depths of his sadness for her and she ached to weep once more.

She deliberately spiralled herself inside that pinwheel in her head, immersing her sense of herself within its core, at its hub. There she imagined herself to be the spiral's nexus, the place where it began, tiny and untarnished inside the maelstrom of spinning light and heat. The pain diminished a little and she gradually drifted into her usual, fitful pattern of sleep.

To be continued… (I hope)