Overcoming limits

As she stood there, she felt it. That weird burning coarsing through her veins. Except this time it was stronger. It wasn't like anything she has ever felt before. The pain progressed through the years and, even though she never would have imagined herself in a state of such numbness towards what was happening to her, there she was.

She was taken by surprise. It was too strong, too fast. Something was out of the ordinary. She was standing alone in the middle of the crowd, feeling the boiling heat rising in her body while her face did not betray any change within. It felt as if she couldn't move. She couldn't see anything in detail, just the entire image that surrounded her. She couldn't distinguish any sound in particular, only the combined voices of people her age that tried to make themselves understood over the loud music.

When it all began, ten years before, the people around her believed it was just a phase. They were not talking about it. It was a taboo subject in their group, always to be avoided. But they were normal people nonetheless, so gossips and judgmental looks were part of their habitual instincts. They whispered around the corner, afraid of being judged by the others for thinking less about one of their own.

After a while, they began to say that she was not worth the trouble. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the truth. Nobody wanted to see her for what she really was. It's not that they were scared, but they were just too self-sufficient with their lives that they did not want anything to change. They let it pass. They let it become worse. They let her reach the peak of suffering. Only then, they helped her.

She remembered all of it as she was standing there, paralyzed by the complexity of her own decisions. She realized that she hadn't felt in years what she was experiencing in those exact seconds. A sad smile crossed her lips thinking that only a couple of hours earlier she was happily considering her future. She was impressed with herself. She had been over it and able to move on with her life for years. All the hard work, all the therapy sessions, the shed tears, the lonely days, they became insignificant in those moments. Everything had been in vain.

Her life flashed before her eyes in a matter of seconds. She saw herself in all the possible states of mind, from absolute happiness to complete despair. Sometimes she had been lonely, other times surrounded by people who loved her and cared for her. But she never felt so strong, yet so compelled by the state she was experiencing.

She knew herself. Despite what everyone around her thought, she actually understood what she was going through. She knew how it started ten years before and she knew what was happening to her in that exact moment.

Suddenly, she gave in. She looked one more time around her, as she sensed that oxygen wasn't filling her lungs anymore. She finally collapsed to the floor, a white trail of foam dripping out from her mouth.

Irony made it so that if you asked her when she was just a child, she would have told that she would never touch drugs in her life.