This is your life.

You’re nothing special, not really athletic, and forced to stay home. Your dad stacks books with subjects that a college sophomore would study, and not a high school freshman. Your life gradually starts to revolve around studies and books and more books and just books books books about knowledge and novels are a no-no at home now, too…..

You sigh and look up from page three-hundred and seventy-two in your biochemistry textbook, your fingers reaching up to rub your temples. Your lifeless eyes dart to the closed-blinds window and wince at the sunlight peeking through the gaps.

Outside, there is life and people and emotions. The only outside you experience is school, and that doesn’t even remotely count because you never leave your desk unless it’s for lunch or dire need to use the loo, but even then, your nose is constantly stuck in a book, your ears blocking the gossiping and dramatic whispering about how you’re always studying and looking and acting like a robot.

You use to have friends, but then they decided you were a killjoy, never truly smiling or laughing to jokes, always thinking about what you need to finish reading in those textbooks or the measures your parents would go to if you ran away from home. Sleep only lives for seven hours, no such thing as sleeping in. You learned the hard way when it comes to asking your parents to go somewhere with people you long to be with.

The sunlight is making you go temporarily blind and you turn your head away to look in the mirror that’s at a perpendicular angle from your bed. It’s been two years since your life has been like this. Nobody cares, nobody notices how your skin color is paling or how the fat is leaving your face, your cheeks hollow and eyes too passive and glassed over, your arms becoming thinner from their old chubbiness.

Dinner time is only fifteen minutes. You’re always thinking, always calculating

Always alone.

But there’s this kingka at your school who likes to smile at you in the hallways and in class and he’s the only source of your little showing of life, your fluttering heart. He’s always greeting people, but in your few minutes of observation, you think he gives you a special smile just for you. Maybe it’s practiced from being on the dance team or because you don’t scream, “Taemin-oppa~!” like the rest of the girls in your school.

However, even your mouth can’t smile, so chronically pulled into a grim line.

Just glancing back over to the window makes your heart catch in your throat, your body slowly shaking. Your skin-and-bones hand slaps over your mouth to hide the sobs that are finally breaking over two years. Since then, you’ve never cried, just submissively obeying your parents’ orders.

But now everything is deteriorating.

You want to feel the sunlight again, soak up some vitamin D, laugh again.

You just want to be outside.