I don't wanna be your friend

Chapter 24

The outfall was paved with a few challenges Cedric hadn't anticipated. In order to be in line with his resolutions, he was trying his dammest not to conclude himself as the coordinator of his torment. It was funny how living under the shadow of blaming himself had both perks as well as the power to cause irreparable damage to his psyche, but now, if he wanted to really get better, he couldn't do it anymore. It was time for Cedric to come out of his hiding spot and face everything in the light of objectivity.

His mind was slowly clearing the fog of exhaustion and fear that was deep-rooted in him, which resulted in a very interesting change in Cedric's perception of his life. He realized that his life and all the space that he shared were devoid of any term that would be used to describe him.
One day, Cedric just took a tour of his house; all the walls were a boring beige, and in all the photos hung on it, Cedric was no more than 7, and then there were frames of his parents' degrees, nothing more. The walls in his room were as new as they were when they moved in, no stickers or posters or any of his medals, trophies and certificates. No personality at all.

Most people, including his parents, believed that Cedric didn't care for small, silly things like that— it was just that he had experienced how much it cost to care. Soon after his grandfather's death, their house was getting repainted. Aunt Pamela had asked him what his favorite color was, it never occurred to him to lie, so he said blue. The next day, Cedric couldn't find a single blue item in the house, along with all his blue clothes. Just like that, all the vibrant colors that he had drawn and scribbled on the walls were replaced by a boring beige.
Every time he came home with a new certificate or a medal, prizes, and rewards from teachers, Aunt Pamela threw them into a box, and they were forgotten about as soon as the box was closed. Even after she left, that habit didn't leave Cedric; since then, he had so many such boxes in a corner of his closet— it was just that psychological tuning that made all of those things seem invaluable.

With his mind made up, Cedric returned home with two cans of paint, and by the end of two exhausting days, three walls of his room were painted a light sky blue and one a rich midnight blue. His work looked clumsy, and there were untidy paint splatters on the floor and on the things he didn't cover properly in his haste, but all that hue on those walls made him feel more comfortable in his room than he had ever been.

It didn't matter that his parents didn't notice that change.

He was used to being by himself a lot of time, but he had never considered it 'me time', and in all the holidays lined up between Christmas and New Year, that is what he did. Another spa day in that spa Damien introduced him to was honestly refreshing, as was driving aimlessly in the city with the radio on. And parking on some abandoned road along the outskirts to look at the sunset didn't live up to the hype, but it gave a sense of importance to something that— objectively— was nothing special and recurrent.

The fact that he didn't have to keep track of time to take his next pill was liberating— now, in the midst of discovering himself, it was hard to believe that his whole ordeal with pain meds had been real. It made Cedric realize that he had to work on those detachments he felt, so after watching a few YouTube videos about it, he decided to maintain a journal and practice gratitude.

The first thing he wrote was that he was grateful he could breathe.

For two days, he struggled to write 5 good things about himself.

Then it was Christmas Eve, and so many things were changing so soon. Aunt Pamela had hated Christmas, she didn't let him have the gifts his parents had bought him, so somehow, in the past few years, their Christmas celebrations had come down to just having dinner at a fancy restaurant. But this year was different.

"The person who has the heaviest trash bag gets the whole box of assorted cupcakes and macarons," as soon as Sophia said that, everybody got moving.

Cedric never knew Christmas Eve could be the busiest day of the year, with all the orders Sophia received for Christmas, the whole day was spent going through shopping lists, baking, decorating cakes and cookies, cutting wrapping paper, packing orders and gifts they were going to donate, driving around the city to deliver them to customers or surprising people with unexpected gifts.
By the end of the day, the living room was completely littered with paper cuttings, Christmas decorations, pine needles, and the smell of frosting. With the bribe of more delicious desserts, everybody got to cleaning the mess and collecting it in their respective trash bags as fast as they could. And though Branden won, everybody attacked the cupcakes and macarons to take their share.