controlled Breathing
933 Words
Chapter 5: Controlled Breathing
Taizya began speaking to herself without noticing when it started.
At first, it was practical—whispers under her breath while studying, rehearsing explanations, correcting imagined mistakes. A way of organizing thought. But gradually, the tone shifted. The pauses lengthened. The answers came back too quickly, too clearly, as though someone else had been waiting to respond.
She would catch herself mid-sentence and stop listening.
Nothing followed. And yet the silence felt occupied.
At home, she narrated her movements quietly, especially at night. Lock the door. Count the money. Breathe. It calmed her, the illusion of conversation. The illusion that she was not alone with her thoughts.
Paranoia crept in slowly, disguised as vigilance.
She began checking windows twice. Listening for footsteps that never materialized. Memorizing the sound of the house settling so she could distinguish it from movement. Her cousin’s presence became unbearable—not because he did anything new - but because he existed too close, too often, too carelessly.
The avoidance strategies stopped working.
One night, he cornered her in the narrow passage near the bathroom, blocking her way with a grin that suggested familiarity he had never earned. He said something quietly—something deniable. Something meant to remind her that no one would believe her.
Taizya did not scream.
She moved before thought fully formed.
The attack was brief, explosive, and silent. She struck him with whatever was closest—her elbow, her fists, her weight. Rage arrived without language, stripped of fear or hesitation. She did not aim to kill him. She aimed to stop him. Permanently.
He fell back, shocked more than injured, blood at his mouth, terror finally replacing confidence.
“Stay away from me,” she said calmly, her voice unfamiliar even to herself.
He did.
After that night, he avoided her entirely. Changed his routines. He refused to be alone in the same room. Fear had done what silence could not.
Taizya returned to her room and sat on the floor until morning, shaking only after the danger had passed.
She told no one.
But she noticed the shift.
Her aunt began watching her differently. Noticing the way Taizya’s eyes lingered too long before answering. The way her head tilted slightly when spoken to, as if listening to something beneath the words. The stillness in her posture—too deliberate, too composed.
“You don’t look right,” her aunt said once, half-joking, half-wary. “You stare like your grandmother used to.”
The comparison unsettled the household.
Her uncle, who had spent years emotionally absent, started asking questions. Small ones at first. Whether she was sleeping. Eating. Overworking herself. He did not know how to intervene, but instinct warned him that something was wrong.
Family history has a way of resurfacing when silence becomes too heavy.
It came out gradually in fragments.
Their grandmother had not always been stable. Trauma had shaped her early life—violence, abandonment, and loss stacked without reprieve. There were years when she spoke to people who were not there. Years when grief distorted reality. Years when survival depended on routine and stubborn will rather than peace.
The twins had saved her.
Caring for Tinashe and Taizya had given her purpose sharp enough to anchor her mind. Responsibility forced coherence. Love demanded presence. The madness never disappeared—it was managed, redirected, and contained by devotion.
And it had run in the family.
Their mother, too, had shown signs. Mood shifts. Detachment. Episodes of disappearance—mental and physical. When she left them, it was not cruelty. It was fear. Fear of becoming what she was trying to outrun.
Leaving was her version of protection.
This knowledge did not comfort Taizya.
It explained too much.
She began recognizing patterns in herself she could no longer dismiss. The internal dialogues. The sense of being observed. The emotional flattening punctuated by sudden violence. The clarity that followed the breakdown rather than preceding it.
She became meticulous.
If her mind was unreliable, her behavior would not be. She followed routines strictly. Maintained academic excellence. Held her jobs without error. Control became obsession—not because she wanted power, but because she feared what would happen without it.
The hallucinations adapted.
Tinashe no longer appeared as memory. She appeared as presence.
Sometimes seated quietly at the edge of Taizya’s bed. Sometimes reflected faintly in mirrors. Sometimes only as a voice that did not sound imagined.
They let it happen.
You know that now.
Taizya did not argue.
She focused on school. On money. On measurable progress. Teachers praised her consistency. Employers trusted her reliability. The family mistook discipline for healing.
The hints were there.
The way she flinched when touched unexpectedly.
The way she froze mid-conversation, eyes unfocused for a second too long.
The way her notebooks contained margins filled with repeated phrases rewritten until the ink tore through the page.
No one pressed the issue.
Mental illness, like grief, was easier to ignore when it functioned quietly.
But pressure accumulates even in silence.
One evening, after finishing a late shift, Taizya walked home and felt the weight of everything collapse inward—not dramatically, not publicly, but decisively. She stood beneath a flickering streetlight and realized that whatever she was becoming could no longer be reversed by effort alone.
She had inherited more than memory.
She had inherited fracture.
And yet—beneath the paranoia, beneath the voices, beneath the tightening grip of obsession—there remained something else.
Purpose.
Not survival.
Direction.
She inhaled slowly. Counted. Exhaled.
Controlled breathing.
The method still worked.
For now.
- Writer
