Wild Nights, Wild Nights || s.reid

31. Who Never Lost, Are Unprepared

CONTENT WARNING: THEMES OF ABUSE, DRUG ADDICTION, AND SUICIDAL IDEATION

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It had been three months since the hospital, and in those past three months, you had resigned from your position at the lab, taken down your PhD from its place in your office and shoved it in a box in the closet, and decided that you would spend the rest of your life atrophying. This meant that you were either staring into nothing for the entire day, or rereading the same passage from John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman:

"You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens."

"We are all in flight from the real reality."

You certainly had been, at least.

You just didn't see much of a point anymore.

You were just so tired.

You'd spent the past five years keeping yourself so busy that you'd barely had time to think, pretending like you could keep living your life as normal while routinely making yourself stay awake for over forty-eight hours at a time so you could keep the demons at bay. It used to be easier than it was now. After the hospital, Alex had found your hoard of stimulants. He'd threatened to send you to rehab, but you couldn't even look at them anymore without sobbing.

The week before the hospital—the first visit—had shown you how they'd destroyed you in both body and mind.

It had been your fault. Because of them, it had been your fault.

It had been your fault.

It was your fault.

That story you'd never tell—you would never tell because you couldn't bear to think of yourself like that. To acknowledge that you had done that.

But your bed had now become a warzone for you despite the fact that Alex would hold you close to him every single time you'd wake up screaming, or sobbing, or even completely numb.

Every time, he'd look at you the exact same frozen expression—a mix of pity and discomfort and something you couldn't name. It was like he no longer saw you as a whole person anymore.

You knew that something had broken within you, but you resented him for thinking it all the same.

You grew to hate sharing a bed with him, or with anyone who might see you at your weakest. You hated lying there when he woke up to go to work, and you hated the look on his face when he returned to find you in the exact same position. You'd taken to passing out in your office on the couch whenever your body would finally give out.

And he didn't like that, either. He didn't like having an eye on you every second he was home.

But you didn't particularly care. Maybe if you stopped caring about everything, maybe if you just allowed yourself to finally rot on the outside like you had internally for the past five years, you'd finally fade away into nothing.

There was a certain irony to it—of once being a wunderkind, a "genius," and now just wasting away.

If you still had a sense of humor, you might have laughed at the thought.

But that day you'd gotten the energy to just sort through bills that had been piling up. You didn't usually deal with your finances or bills. Alex typically did, and if he needed you to sign anything, you'd just do it without second thought.