Give Me Love

chapter six

That sleep didn't last long. You had awoken out of your nightmare with a gasp— not because you had woken yourself up from it, but because something else had woken you up.

You shivered under your blankets, poking your head out long enough to feel the brisk air of late autumn chill practically freeze your face. Blearily blinking the sleep out of your eyes, you peered at your window, which had been left wide open.

That's odd, you thought. Even through miles of heavy exhaustion weighing on your consciousness, you don't think you've ever forgotten to close your window, not once since you'd been living here.

But there were a lot of things happening lately that you thought would never happen, so you pushed yourself out of bed, dragged your way to the window, and slammed it closed. While you were up, you pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a larger sweater to fight off the chills of your now freezing room.

Unfortunately for you, the fact that you were awake meant it was nearly impossible that you could get back to sleep now. After hours of tossing and turning, you accepted the fact that it just wasn't going to happen, and stayed awake staring at your dark ceiling.

If there was anything worse than dreaming about your problems, it was being awake in a darkened room with nothing to think about other than your problems. Before the memories of you and the girls and all the good times you've had together could come creeping back into your mind, you shot to your feet and dug through your dresser drawer, wrenching out a pair of old earbuds and plugging them into your phone.

The habit was an old one, but it never failed you. Back home on Noxella, you would always go to sleep blasting music every night. It got to the point where you genuinely couldn't sleep unless there was deafening music playing in your ears at all times, to draw any thoughts out.

You brought that tradition back now, jabbing the earbuds in your ears, queuing up an old playlist, and upping the volume until it hurt your eardrums. You settled back onto the bed and sighed, focusing hard on the lyrics and increasing the volume on your phone until you couldn't hear your thoughts anymore.

Your eyes opened right on time to get ready for work the next day— muscle memory, you were sure, because you had never actually gone to bed.

You managed to tie your hair in a low, messy bun at the base of your neck today, and even ate half a banana before leaving for work. It wasn't nearly good enough, you were certain of it, but it's all you could stomach without throwing up everywhere.

Work was the same old. Nothing really interesting happened. The next day went no different, Friday wasn't either— if you didn't count the one clone you had lost from blunt force trauma to the head. The injury itself wasn't very gory, but the awful fact that he would never wake up from simply hitting his head the wrong way was devastating to his friends.

After breaking the news, you locked yourself in your office and refused to take any more patients as you sat in a ball on the patient-bed, cold tears streaming down your face. Rico most certainly took that off your paycheck.

After you got it together enough to make the trek back home, you closed up and grabbed your paycheck from the front. You were already making plans to try and shower tonight, at the same time wondering how it got so bad that you had to motivate yourself to shower. It used to be your favorite part of the day.

But every day, the silence in your life got a little more suffocating. The absence of the girls became a little more unbearable, and the emotions you had been so desperately trying to hold back kept knocking more and more incessantly.

Your phone no longer lit up with texts from anyone anymore. No one ever asked how your day went, or wished you good morning or good night, or said they loved you, or tried to make you smile. You wondered, for the millionth time this week: