Page 46 - Highlights 2022

Dionysian Night

by Kayley Dao '25

Looking at my mirror at 1:28 A.M. on a Tuesday night was not a good thing to do. I felt the walls watching me
with wide blinking eyes. The bathtub looked as if it was about to jump up and bite my head off.

Something’s crawling through the walls, or shifting and stumbling through the pipes.

I think the sink water was poisoned. I used it to wash my face. It felt like acid.

Burning and melting and crying and turning and whining and hurting and feeling and learning and wishing about
dying and throbbing and churning and rolling and rocking back and forth on the cold tile floor and stinging and
gnashing and thrashing and aching and tensing and -

Only static from the T.V. fills the floor. If sound was a void this would be it. Repetition and changing algorithms
crammed into a single pill.

I open my eyes and pick myself up. The light was now purple. The room was spinning. Everything looked like it
was in a heat haze, curling and swaying and making me nauseous.

I looked back in the mirror. My reflection was unrecognizable. Amorphous shapes plastered on the blank slate,
refashioning themselves on the canvas of my face.

My hands just seem to dilate back and forth while my ears seem to fall off and grow back.

My hair falling and growing and shrinking and glowing and changing every tenth of a second. What’s going on,
what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on? What’s happening?

It felt like a full-on sensory overload.
The static is back. The void dragged me down into the mouth of the floor. I tried to struggle out without cutting
myself from the sharp teeth growing from the sides. I felt like I was falling. I felt as if I was hit in the head again
and again and again and…

A white light.

Then an alarm.
I wake up in the bathroom, curled up on the stained tile floor. I look up to the ceiling.

The once-magenta light is back to the plain white light I installed years ago.
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I get up and walk out to turn off the alarm.

7:15 A.M