FICTIONAL SKETCH: COLLAPSE
A scene in a classroom. A view from inside.
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You blink sharply, emerging from the thick fog of your own thoughts, and slowly return to reality. Your gaze wanders absently around the classroom — over the tattered posters on the walls, the rows of desks, the faces of your classmates — until it meets the teacher’s intense, piercing stare. Your eyes widen involuntarily, your pupils tremble — you realise that all attention is now fixed on you. There is no irritation or anger in his eyes, only wary attentiveness, as if he is trying to read something behind your mask of indifference.
You hastily straighten up, pushing your chair back sharply — it screeches across the floor, shrill and guilty, as if giving you away completely. You stand up from your desk, mechanically straightening your shirt sleeve as you try to gather your thoughts. Your movements are abrupt and jerky — you’re like a marionette whose strings have become tangled and slackened. Your palms involuntarily clench into fists, then open just as abruptly — you’re trying to look confident, but inside everything is tightening with awkwardness, twisting into a tight knot.
You (hesitating, your voice trembling slightly):
‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I… was listening. Honestly.’
And that’s when you make a mistake. You lift your head to meet the teacher’s gaze — a last-ditch attempt to show that you’re still in the ranks. But under that gaze, as cold and judgemental as a military officer’s at a parade, something inside you snaps and breaks. You feel it physically — as if the threads holding you together in a coherent, human form, at your wrists, in your shoulders, in your neck, hadn’t been pulled tight enough. And now they’re starting to unravel.
You imagine how your voice will break again, how the words will get stuck in your throat, how you’ll finally fall apart right in front of the whole class — not metaphorically. Literally: you’ll turn into a flimsy heap of limbs and confusion. Your skin, smooth and sweaty with tension, begins to feel like porcelain — thin, cold, ready to crack at the slightest awkward movement or a word spoken too loudly. You stand frozen in this silence, which hums in your ears, and feel as though the last threads holding you together are about to snap.
A voice pounds in your temples: ‘Don’t look. Don’t think. Just hold on.’ But there’s nothing left to hold on to. You focus on the teacher again, trying to catch even the slightest hint of what he’s going to do next. At that moment, you hate yourself for your weakness, for this inability to keep up appearances, for finding yourself in the spotlight once more — but no longer as an ordinary pupil, but as the object of silent condemnation, curiosity and a slow, public unravelling.
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