"What are you running away from?"
Questions like that always triggered an overwhelming sense of melancholia — she could never fathom the reason behind the sudden influx of emotions, it just happened. Slumped against the wall of some dingy alleyway with her head between her knees, she struggled to regulate her breathing; the sensation of a tightening chest made the whole process harder. Oh my god am I going to die like this? Too tight her chest was too tight and her lungs felt like they were on fire. Her vision was blurred by the tears in her eyes but she could see the stranger who had sprung the sudden inquisition.
Why was he still standing there? Her face buried in her small hands (cheeks were burning, they warmed her palms), the tears threatening to spill at any moment. What am I running from? The people, the crowds, everything. Hyorin could, for the most part, control herself. At least she pretended as I could — as though there was a switch or button that could just switch it off. Yet sometimes it was just unbearable. Suffocating. A darkness that consumed her brain which rendered her useless, unable to verbalize anything at all – unless she began to sob. That was the worse. She struggled to comprehend what was happening, or what had happened, to her for the twenty years of her life. The only thing she understood was that it almost always felt as though she was on the brink of death.
Being questioned in the midst of a panic attack understandably worsened the situation. Here she was, freaking the fuck out about god knows what, when a hooded figure presented her with even more pain. It crossed her mind that this time she really was dying; he must have been the grim reaper or angel of death (or some sort of death-related entity.) Death itself didn’t frightened her, life did and so did the ‘afterlife’. She pulled her hands away from her face; her palms were wet with tears. It was only then that it hit her that she had been sobbing, no no, not sobbing – weeping (for how long? she couldn’t pinpoint an exact moment when the waterworks had started). They were uncontrollable and irrepressible and was entwined with a single word, repeated over and over in arbitrary intervals: “Everything. Everything. Everything. ” She was afraid of everything.
