Laying down against the pillow, she pressed her head down until her skull met the hard surface of the knife below. She stared up at the grey ceiling, feeling the fog cover her in its weight.

The room was too large, too wide. Laying there, staring up at the vast ceiling, it felt as though her head was gone. Like each part of her, her eyes, her nose, her fingers, her toes were all detached. Like her entire body was simply hanging by one thin thread that's swaying with the force of the wind outside.

"Diana! Dinner!" Her mother's raspy voice echoed through the hallways. Breaking her concentration and refocusing it onto the sweet smell of rice that drifted through the house.

"How was work?" Her father sat across from him. The tips of his hair were still wet from his shower. Turning his brown hair a black. He took a sip of water and she watched it work its way down his throat.

"They put me on paid leave." Diana ripped through the levels of muscle with the edge of her knife. There was a slight vermillion puddle on her plate that drifted into the white rice. She dragged the tip of her knife back and forth through the small puddle, drawing designs in the blood before they disappeared a few seconds later. 

Her mother chimed in, "Don't play with your food. Eat it." Diana stabbed the steak and heard the silver of the fork clink against the grey plate. She ate it, mashing it with the white rice and green asparagus. The food fell like sharp and weighted rocks tumbling through to her stomach. It felt as if they tore at her esophagus.

Food seemed to be a weird thing to adjust to for Diana she noticed. She'd been eating the same thing for the past few years; bread and a slop that she didn't know the ingredients to. Sometimes the food here would taste exactly like she'd remembered it. Bright and vibrant. Other times, like her once favourite foods tasted like sand on her tongue.

"Well I'm sure you're going to be back in a jiffy." The comment made Diana give a half-hearted smile to the table. There was no going back, not after what she'd done for them. What they did to her.

So as her parents tried to give quiet bouts of hope, Diana knew that perhaps there was no moving on from the last five years. Not as easily as her parents prayed.

Sinking in her chair, Diana gazed at her mother as she ate another piece of steak. She gave no comments about her work or the paid leave. Her mother didn't ask about what happened unlike everyone else. And Diana didn't tell.

Her mother had been raised as reserved, still blindingly obvious by her buttoned up cardigan and planned out life. Diana still remembered with vibrancy when they had to stay with wàigōng and wàipó over the summers. Being raised in the moving urban life, Diana hated the quiet. Every night at home she would hear cars run past or the occasional music, even the Adhan would play through the thin walls of her neighbours’ house. But it was so silent at night in the low countryside. So quiet during the night that Diana could hear her siblings' breaths in the dark of night.

Sometimes she would listen so intently it felt like she was waiting for their breaths to stop. The thought would immediately freak her out, no matter how many times the thought had popped up earlier in the day. She would cry and wail, meanwhile Phoebe would have to hold her till she fell asleep. The soothing rise and fall of her chest was like a rocking, a blanket that soothed her till slumber overtook her bones.

Diana had always been sure that her grandparents could hear her sputtering wailing but they never came into the room. But in the end, she knew if her mother had grown up in a home like that, that perhaps her reservation was warranted.

Dinner finished with small talk of their days at work. The dumb or interesting questions asked in her mother's lectures. The car problems at the mechanic shop her father helped out at. Is this what life had been like before she'd left?

The problem was Diana couldn't remember. She was wading through fog and clawing desperately to see her way out of the grey world she'd been thrust into.