Thrusting her hand deep into the bag of sand, her expression remained frozen. Tiny white particles encased her shaking skin, catching between her nails, gnawing into the cuts of her fingers.
She could feel nothing.
Only the sand running along her wrist. She dug deeper. She felt it rise to her elbow, press tenderly against her veins, its cold touch reminiscent of childhood memories.
She was taken back to simpler times, when skimming stones with a smiling face was enough, when counting the pebbles marks on the water were suffice to make a heart beam.
She clenched the sand within her palm. The particles pressed against the lines in her hand, filled every crevice, line every wrinkle.
She grazed her thumb against her index finger, crushing sand within her grasp, her jaw grating in strain.
She could still feel nothing.
She could remember walking the edge of a beach with her father, her toes tenderly pressed in against the damp sand, water lightly circling her ankles.
She remembered the feeling it gave her. She remembered how secure, how strong, how real she felt.
She remembered thinking that this, this moment, was what it meant to be alive.
Her eyes widened in fear. She raised her hand from the bag and thrust it in again, let the sand drag against her skin like rock, let it cut her knuckles she thrust so deeply, let it dig between her nails she pressed so harshly against her palm.
Still, she felt nothing.
Only fear.
She ran through her head every reason to feel, dwelled on every crevice of heart, every exposed piece of emotion.
She wished to exploit it. She wished to drag her still mind into the chaos of feeling; she wished to escape this cocoon of silence, of nothing.
She saw everything.
Everything in her world, she saw how her world was, and how she had seen it.
She could see each world was different, and she only wished to have different eyes with which to see her own.
She wished to see the world the way in which others she had seen did. They could see one of joy, one of hope, of destiny, of fate and of love, one of inevitability, one void of loneliness, and filled with emotion.
Her world, among billions, she could not see with these eyes.
She could see no destiny. No point. She could see nothing that existed. There was nothing.
Only the feel of sand against her skin, only the feel of cold white particles drag against her knuckles, fill the lines of her clenched fist.
She could feel nothing. And so she drew her hand through sand, to feel in physicality, if not in heart.
She told herself, in a world where nothing existed, where nothing was real, to feel was enough.
You could not hold a feeling. You could not touch it, or even see it. It was as real as all else.
She lifted her hand from the bag, pulling grains of sand upwards as she did, and her eyes traced the marks in which the particles had left, raw red lines, indents of white; of feeling.
She could only watch and wonder, why it was that she could only express herself, when she felt nothing.
Why she remained silent when she felt everything, and saw the world with eyes that were not her own.
She felt no one would ever see her heart.
She did not care.
She only wished someday, to see it as she once did, not as a machine, as an instrument of living, a cause of living, but as a red beating beast of emotion, a reason for life.
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