Too Bright to be Brilliant(Open)

AKINA ANTHEA HOOPER

I'm bored
I'm the chairman of the bored
I'm a lengthy monologue
I'm livin' like a dog
I'm bored

The buzzer that signals lunch break is loud and shrill and Akina drops her loom like a grenade. Her brain has been on autopilot, searching for faults, analyzing them and then mending them. Now her mind raced into full speed, watching and deducing everything around her, filling her mind with nonsense.

She tried to sit with her colleagues during lunch, but their chatter was too loud, their points too mindless. Moving with a swiftness that makes her limbs ache, Akina rushes out of the factory and into the alleyway that has often been a refuge from idiocy and colour.

Akina curls her legs up underneath her, perched on the windowsill of the cotton factory. The alley that the window looked onto was deserted, but from her position Akina could easily see the other district cotton workers, filing in an out of the heavy wooden doors as they went to or returned from work.

Look at them, all so mindless, like drones. Who cares about work? Who cares about any of this nonsense when there is so much noise?

Akina's hands are vibrating with the energy she is struggling to control. It wouldn't do to have one of her 'bored' outbursts at work. At least not again. This week. All she has to do is make it through the day and get back to the flat. The wall needs another good thrashing. Akina tries to focus her energy inwards, a trick that has made her brain slow down on previous occasions. But her mind has been idle too long, stuck in the The sensory overload is threatening to grow bothersome, there's too much colour, too much noise, too many things to see and analyze.

Four cracks in the wall opposite, three horizontal, one vertical. The vertical crack is from an accident when the cotton factory was built, a falling beam or the like. Sixteen ants on the ground below me, Ants form colonies that range in size from a few dozen predatory individuals living in small natural cavities to highly organised colonies that may occupy large territories and consist of millions of individuals. Larger colonies consist mostly of sterile wingless females forming castes of "workers", "soldiers", or other- Fourteen people have walked past the alley in the past five minutes, eight women, six men. Three blondes, ten brunettes and one ginger-haired woman who has been stealing unspun hemp. There are three clouds within my point of view, that one looks like a seahorse, now a dragon, now a man, now a boat. The sky isn't just blue either, that's the worst part. It's green and pink and yellow and white and dark and blue blue blue blue blue blue-

Akina yanks herself out of her head with a gasp, sliding ungracefully off the windowsill and onto the ground. Shaking slightly, Akina presses her forehead into the dirt and forces steady breaths.

Damn my mind.

Most of the time, Akina loves her brain, loves that things just make sense. Other times, like when her hyper-attention and cleverness turn against her, Akina just wants to drown, to be overtaken by soundless, thoughtless black, and be left with nothing. Taking deep breaths, Akina rocks back onto her heels and turns her face upwards to the sky, letting the noon day sun warm her face.

I bore myself to sleep at night
I bore myself in broad daylight