Elusion

The days bled into one another. Delila couldn’t tell you which square on the calendar any particular day fit into. Because every morning started the same for Delila.

The scheduled shuffle began with the ear-numbing tone of the artificial bell. Stinging, fluorescent light illuminated gray-tiled hallways. Teachers and students marched with stone-filled shoes to their classrooms. Cups of coffee were attached to the instructors’ faces, and messy piles of papers exploded from their arms. Here and there, a smile materialized on the blank and dreary faces of their tired students.

Delila sighed at the unremarkable day-to-day humdrum of high school. The monotonous, aching, never-ending years of being a teenager.

The second bell sounded. Delila pushed some of her limp hair behind a pale ear as she slipped into European History. She wormed her way through the narrow rows of desks, mindful not to bump into a corner or another student. She left the air chilly in her wake. Lauryn Berkley let out a slight shiver as she twirled a lock of her carefully constructed curls.

Luckily, girls like Delila were invisible to pretty-faced popular types like Lauryn. Not even worth an insult. Nobodies like Delila were only noticeable under direct light. Like a teacher’s recognition. But Delila’s days of being called on for her thoughts and answers were over. She was a forgotten soul even among the staff. Though she had never liked to be singled out in the sea of her peers, Delila had come to miss it.

The class discussion commenced, and from a seat in the back corner of the room, Delila set her gaze out the grated window on her left. The metal latticework welded to the window frames made high school feel even more like a prison.

She asked once, when she was smaller and in elementary school, why the windows needed the iron grilles. For safety, Mrs. Lisbeth had said, so the students can’t fall out of the open windows. Young Delila couldn’t fathom that there had been some great wave of children jumping out windows.

But she imagined it anyway.

The years coursed along. And Delila decided that children did have reason to leap from windows: to escape captivity.

The winter sun was bright, and Delila wondered if the morning rays were powerful enough to warm skin. She longed to feel that sensation deep in her core as the glare played tricks with her eyes. She envisioned the things she would do outdoors if she had the motivation and friends to do things with.

Delila recalled playing whiffle ball and kickball with the children in her neighborhood. Before clothes and shoes and hair determined your worthiness as a friend. They’d play until sundown, until the streetlights came on. She wondered how she’d managed to have so much energy then. That girl had always been ready for a challenge, for playing, and for socializing.

Everything had begun to feel complicated and burdensome at some point. The colors around her had faded. Her spirit weakened. Incentive drained dry. She found it difficult to recall the exact place where living had become bland and lost its delicious luster.

John, the class clown, made a joke about the lesson material. Delila was daydreaming, and she missed his punchline. Still, she smiled at the students’ laughter and Mr. Roberts's frown. This was as close to belonging as she was able to feel. She played at being human.

But Delila hadn’t been human in a year. Or was it longer?

The days had bled together so thoroughly. Delila couldn’t tell you what square on the calendar the rest of the world was in anymore. Time had stopped when the world had reached the peak of feeling unbearable, pallid, and tedious.

She obeyed the overwhelming urge to escape.

And yet, she had only traded one imprisonment for another.

Delila exchanged her dreary days among the living for an eternity of gray among the dead. Drawn to the place that brought her the most misery.

Nothing had changed for Delila.