It was 10 at night. The shouting had finally stopped.
My friend Aditi's parents had been fighting again. She was well aware just how emotionally distant they had become. As their marriage deteriorated, their arguments only grew more frequent.
Aditi (name changed to protect identity) lay in bed counting her breaths, trying to steady the frantic rhythm of her anxious heart. She was twitching her cold feet, perhaps trying to remind them that they were still a part of her body.
This isn't the first time Aditi had experienced anxiety. She had experienced these erratic fights for the past 15 years of her life, and yet her body hadn’t got used to it.
Mornings didn’t feel like a new beginning either. She found it hard to differentiate between the present day and the previous day. Both just felt as dull and lonely as the other.
She wished she could talk to her parents, but in their own emotionless marriage, they found it hard to understand her emotions. Instead, they brushed it off as teenage tantrums. Her teachers said she should focus more on her academics, that if she would drown herself just enough in the erudite world, the non-existent pains of her life would go away.