caffeine to solve your problems (solangelo)

Nico- everything blurs eventually

TW- mentions of self harm/scars/past self harm. (please don't trigger yourself, the paragraphs talking about this will have a note before and after the mentions <3)

Nico still couldn't believe he had seen Ethan kiss that other boy. Ethan's soft pink, warm lips- touching someone else. He hadn't been able to sleep all night. He'd spent the entire time trying to convince himself it was okay. It was a drunken mistake. An accident. But if it was okay, why did it hurt so bad? Nico shoved his fists into his eyes, rubbing them around and making his vision blurry, and then peeled himself off of the couch and went into the bathroom.

The dark haired boy in the mirror looked atrocious. His eyelids were swollen from crying, his hair was greasy and still formed the shape of the couch cushions, and his face was crusted with unwiped tears. Nico sighed, turned the shower on, and peeled off his shirt.

- tw sh -

Underneath his hoodie was the reason Nico refused to ever go shirtless. White scars of varying lengths and depths littered his chest and stomach. He winced looking down at the larger scars, recalling the events leading up to them. Nico would reach two years clean from cutting in a few weeks. The longest he had ever been since he was eleven. As ashamed as he was to admit it, the urges never really went away. It was the first thing he thought about when he saw Ethan with someone else. The first thing he thought about after any sort of inconvenience, any bad day, and even sometimes when he was just bored. Did those urges always make sense? Absolutely not. Did that make them any less valid? Absolutely not. At least, that's what Nico's old therapist used to say.

In that moment, Nico seriously considered cutting. He knew in the moment it would feel so right. It would make him forget his problems. It would make him stop hurting, as ironic as that was. But he couldn't. He had promised Ethan, promised Hazel, promised himself he wouldn't. Nico went through a few rounds of box breaths, (in four, hold four, out four) and sat down on the bathroom floor.

Almost two years ago, the last time Nico had ever cut, was one of the worst nights of his life. Which led to one of the worst weeks of his life. Nico had covered his body in cuts. In the moment it was impulsive, erratic slashing over his stomach, chest, arms, and all down his legs. He remembered the manic grin as he did it, the weight being lifted off his shoulders, and the feeling of contentment. All of that went away the second he stopped. Everything stung. There was way more than he meant to do. Everything was wrong. So wrong. Nico remembered the searing pain as he got into the shower afterwards- so bad he felt lightheaded and dizzy. He remembered the way he was barely able to walk without feeling them rip open and the pain would begin all over again. And worst of all, he remembered the lies and the guilt that went with them. He had missed Hazel's birthday dinner because the pain was so bad he couldn't stand without crying out. He had texted her a paragraph of an apology and told her that he had a splitting headache. It made him feel even worse when she was incredibly sweet and understanding about it. Nico never wanted to go back to those days.

- talk of sh over -

Just because he was having a bad day didn't mean he was going to have a bad life. Nico repeated this to himself over and over. A bad day doesn't equate to a bad life. One bad day is not a lifetime of misery. He got in the shower. Take a day or a even a week to be completely miserable, but you will move on from this. Today's bad day is for today and today only, tomorrow is a fresh start. Optimism had never come naturally to Nico. These phrases were the ones he had spent years teaching himself to remember.

"The key to optimistic thoughts," Nico's therapist had told him, "is to repeat it whether you believe it or not. And eventually, they will become your reality." Nico had laughed in her face when she first said that. He thought it was the stupidest idea he'd ever heard. Telling a pessimist to just "think happy thoughts" is like telling a depressed person to "just smile". Neither go over well. But after a few weeks of consciously choosing kinder thoughts, he started to think they weren't as stupid, and after a few months he even started to believe them. Who knew therapists actually knew how to make you feel better.