Insomniacs (#1)

55. my hope

10:22pm.
two months prior.

I stand here, staring back at myself in the mirror of my cold bathroom. It's silent, so so silent.

My hands press into the sink, my chest still rising unevenly. It's bitterly cold in here or its just my body temperature right now. Either way, goosebumps prickle at my skin and I can see it in my awful reflection.

Living doesn't make much sense to me anymore. And as I come to the realisation, standing here, there's no big epiphany. No drowning tears or aching heart.

It's not an outlandish thing to think. It'd be a little peculiar of me not to think, if we're being honest.

I'm on a medley of anti-depressants so I don't feel many things anymore. Everything's...still. Monotone. Unfeeling but not okay. I have panic attacks most weeks. Bad enough that it takes me a while to recover from them. So that's another cycle I'm stuck in.

I'm pulled back to the day I'm so fucking tired of, every time somebody touches me for too long. Somebody makes a sexual advance or nears my lips. Eight years of the same cycle and exhaustion takes over. And if I'm being frank, I'm so sick of my own trauma. I detest that I was hurt and that I now have to live with the repercussions without a choice. Without a break.

If life, is to be this, over and over again, there isn't much point.

I do nothing asides from try to escape my own mind. Day in, day out. A constant job I have to upkeep. It is all I am and all I do, in essence and I have no room nor energy to muster up anything other than trying to merely get through the day.

That is as much living as a skeleton buried under soil. A dismal, tortured existence if that's all it consists of.

A cigarette sits between my lips and my sunken cheekbones hollow further as I take in a drag. My skin is pale from the panic attack I calmed myself down from moments ago, my hair dishevelled from where I was gripping at it. My hands still tremble vigorously.

I stare at myself. I don't look into mirrors much anymore.

Not many things scare me anymore but my eyes - they terrify me every time I catch a glimpse of them. Because I see nothing in them and once, there was so much life in there. When people were still alive, when I wasn't so ruined.

I stand here. Bare feet in this cold bathroom. And I realise, this is the first time I've actually let myself think. Perhaps the first time, truly, to think about who I have become. Ever.

I am done shutting it out, for the first time in years.

I have never let so many thoughts spill over, in my life. As soon as they roll in, I instinctively cut them off. Shove them down. That's been routine since I was nine and well, before that, a child's thinking isn't all too insightful.

I've never let myself think before. But here I fucking go.

I'm getting worse. I'm not sure why but now, in this moment of my life, I am the worst I have ever been. No event has triggered it, no death has caused it.

If I had to guess, I'd say my body has finally run tired of this mind and I don't blame it. I feel myself withering away now.

My body has run itself to eventual exhaustion and yearns to rest, for once since all that time ago.
I just want to close my eyes. Keep them shut and succumb.