…is lonely. Days and nights meld together between its insulating walls. Ghosts of your past life haunt you. They torture you with glimpses of the time before you started living in the flask, a time when you were happy, when you used to laugh, wear make-up. You were someone then. “Not anymore. You chose this,” they cackle.
They’re right. You chose this responsibility of guarding the flask’s contents, of nourishing it, holding it and keeping it safe, but nobody told you that this job would consume you. That your body would groan and ache in places you never knew existed. That your identity and existence would dissolve into what’s inside.
Sometimes you hear signs of life – your partner watching TV, music from that party in 11B that you were invited to, the roar of vehicles, and strangers laughing on the road outside.
“You’re trapped now.” The voices hiss. You tell yourself they aren’t real, that this is just a fleeting phase, but as dusk approaches, the howling and cackling only grow louder.
Living inside a thermos flask is scary, sort of like living with postpartum depression.
