I don't wanna be your friend

Chapter 15

Sorry for the late updates.
Hope you'll like this chapter. 💜

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Everything that had been happening for the past 20-25 days was messing with Cedric's head to the point where he couldn't spend a single minute without trying to suppress the urge to scream till he lost his voice or cry till his body gave out of dehydration. Everything overwhelmed him— his every single thought, his every single emotional, every single word he exchanged with others... it was all driving him deeper into his steadily expanding void of despair where all he could feel was his skin blazing with the speed of his racing thoughts.

Why was he being so miserable?

Cedric hoped he knew the answer to that, and not having the knowledge of why things were happening the way they were made it a lot worse.

As he laid in his bed, now awake, after getting a few hours of sleep by twisting and turning in between his sheets throughout the restless night, Cedric didn't even know where to start. Every time he blinked his eyes, he felt as if there were grains of sand stuck behind his eyelinds. And when he checked the time to be 6:30 in the morning, Cedric knew that he could do nothing to ease that sensation because nothing he does will let him fall into a state of slumber now.

Cedric had also observed a pattern he'd noticed a few weeks back— every night that he had tried to relax his breathing to help himself fall asleep, his nose started to feel stuffed, but his throat and the end of his nasal passage felt very dry and hollow, and his breathing had also started to become shallow. But this morning, his throat was a little more parched because at some time in the middle of the night, Cedric rushed to his bathroom and had thrown up his dinner.

The dinner last night had stirred a lot of emotions in Cedric. After he had returned home from his shift in the café, he hadn't expected to see his mother waiting for him at their dining table. It was odd, really, to return home and find it not empty, it was odd to see his mother smile at him tiredly and make preparation for them to have dinner together. It wasn't like they didn't ever have meals together, they did— and Cedric even wondered if all the three of them spent more times together at restaurants than they found themselves at home— but this was a change in their routine because every time they tried to spend time together as a family was planned, and there were always schedules to compare before Cedric was prioritised.

Hence, Cedric wasn't prepared and didn't know what to do, or how to feel when his mother tried to initiate small talk with him, asking things like— how was school today, how are tennis lessons going on, etc. And to all of her questions, Cedric's answer was the same 'fine'... because what else could he say? These trivial things didn't matter, and if they did, his parents wouldn't be asking him these questions twice or thrice a year when they accidentally found a chance to.

Cedric was almost done with his dinner just after a few minutes of starting it, and when he got up to take his plate and rinse it off, his mother held him back and served him more, saying, 'what you ate isn't sufficient, here, eat this'.

But this is the most I eat when I do, Cedric thought, and forced himself to ingest the extra amount of food though it was making him feel sick. And at that moment he had an unnecessary urge to ask his mom if she knew that he didn't even eat dinners most nights, that he hadn't eaten breakfast since a long, long time, that most days he had only one meal, if she knew that he was currently dependent on pain medication to function properly, that he is suffering, that his couldn't understand his own suffering, that all of this was making him feel so scared?
Did she care about all these things?