Andrea Damic | From This Point Forward

It’s weird the way I can hear myself breathe. Loud, deep breaths, pounding in my ears similar to being submerged in water, cold and deep. Like diving, except without being surrounded by the Big Blue. My Big Blue is dark and grey, in all its intensity and shades, as far as eyes can see. My Big Blue is eerie, unrevealing and distant as if walking through the haze.

It’s strange the way I tell myself this is how sleepwalkers feel when suddenly awoken from their subliminal state, forced to come to terms with their conscious selves. It must feel so invasive, so protruding not to be ready for the here and now.

It’s odd the way I reminisce about the misty mornings growing up on the lake, the milky thick air floating above the surface, in the break of dawn, almost palpable. My thoughts random like flickering debris of past musings, struggling to re-emerge in the fog of my once analytical brain. Before the world got turned upside down.

It’s peculiar the way I resented my parents for wanting a mundane life. I didn’t like it then but now… I long for it. That world seems to be a perpetual glitch in my cerebral cortex, as the more I push it away, the more it fights back to survive. And the way I think of them, rather often I might say, fading faces long gone, and how I envy them.

It’s eerie the way I lose track of the days, weeks, months. Perhaps it’s the lack of nutrition, or sleepless nights followed by the sensory-encumbered days. The hollow echoes, bouncing around, trapped in this new reality making it hard to distinguish between right and wrong, adventure and survival.

It’s bizarre how the novel neuro-pathways get created, seemingly extraneous and inconsequential, because time has no meaning now. Yet all I seem to cling to is once upon a time. My cognizance yearns for dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s but the unknown variables make me feel unmatched.

It’s uncanny the way the human mind looks for logical elucidations – why is the world coming to an end; was there a more proactive solution to global warming, decades of wars, the virus threat, nuclear threat, any threat… Why didn’t we act sooner? How one loses one’s mind, detaching oneself from reality.

Suddenly, a movement.

Frozen, I hold my breath wondering if it’s the cobwebs in my field of vision, and as I stand motionless, afraid of the warning portent pulsating in my head, it strikes me that the shadow in a half-broken mirror across the street is just me, in PPE suit, looking back. What a timorous creature I’ve become.

This is My World now.

Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and author of prose and poetry. She thinks there is something cathartic about seeing your words and art out in the world. Her literary art appears or is forthcoming in Coalition for Digital Narratives, Sky Island Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Cutbow Quarterly, The Dribble Drabble Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/. You can also find her on X @DamicAndrea, Instagram @damicandrea and FB @AndreaDamic