Trapped

It's the cage that gets her. The bars are too close together. The shell around her, inside the cage, isn't good either. She's building it up to a point that she is struggling to breathe. She keeps feeling herself gulping, but still not getting enough in, it's making her dizzy. It causes her to want to creep into a corner and dissolve. Then she'd just be a puddle, in a shell, in a cage.

She sits amongst them all, hears them talking, but it's like background noise, a TV warbling away to itself in another room. Somehow she manages to respond sufficiently to any interactions that nobody notices her distraction. Her mind is swarming.

She doesn't want to be asked those questions. She knows the answers, she knows the advice, it is what she would say too, but she doesn't want to hear it, not now. Instead she has another drink, toasts to another thing, laughs with them, knowing what she's doing, spiralling. Her laugh is hollow.