seventh

126 21 17

by ciglou

by ciglou

Dear Mad,

I'm not so good today. The sun is shining - a rarity these days - but my heart doesn't even know what that means. The "shining", wherever it used to be, isn't coming back. I thought getting away from Dr. Napeer and thinking optimistically would change things.

It didn't.

I saw my mother today. That's why I'm upset.

She called me earlier this week and asked me to come up for the seventieth time to attempt making it to her and Dan's anniversary party. That's a few weeks away, sure, but she told me "it would make it easier for me to think about and decide". Why do people treat me like I'm a sheltered child, that has no idea how to work in goddamn life anymore? Yeah, I may be less social than I used to be, and I sure don't go in public as often as before, but I still function.

She's bothered me with thirty seven phone calls over the last month. Yes, you read that right. If I could see your reaction (oh, how I wish I could), I know your mouth would have fallen to the floor by now. "But your mother is never the one to call," you would tell me. I know Mad, I know, but my mother has become just as insane as I have. Once you left, she couldn't stop worrying about me. Was I eating? Was I sleeping? Was I harming myself? Was I considering suicide? Was I still working? Was I paying the bills? Showering? The list of questions she nailed into my skull was endless.

I answered every time she called in the beginning. Back when you were still here, you would make me answer every time the phone would ring with the ringtone I'd set for her. "Your mum cares about connecting with you," You would lecture me each time I groaned over having to talk with her. "What if someday she stopped?"

She hasn't stopped. And I know this makes you angry, Madeline, but god how I wish she did.

I can't do it. I can't answer her questions anymore, since they were just empty thoughts with no answers. I can't have her treating me like an injured dog with thorns stuck in my paw. Yeah, thorns are stuck beneath my nails so deep that I'm sure if I took them out I would bleed out completely, but I can't have her to be the one to deal with it.

I'm a grown man, I can do it all by myself. I don't need anyones help.

She's afraid I'll give up, stop trying to live to the best of my ability. But there's a difference between giving up and knowing when you've had bloody enough.

The reason I'm upset specifically today is that my mother had the sense it was right to come down to the house and pester me in person. I can't even remember the last time I saw her, but she didn't look any different, or some book-shit like that. She looked just like herself, standing on the porch and pounding on the door.

"I'm tired of this back and forth game you've been playing. If you're angry at me, fine darling, be angry at me, but you and me both know I haven't done anything wrong. No one's done anything wrong, Louis. You're angry at nothing, don't you understand? Not only that, you're making it very hard on your siblings to realize their old loving brother hasn't bothered to reach out to them in months. Do you really want Dotty and Ernie to grow up forgetting who you are? The girls used to mention you all the time, bugging me to update them on how you were, but now your name has become an unorthodox word. You're not just hurting yourself by this, whatever this is, but you're hurting many others."

She stood at the door and didn't bite her tongue lecturing me on my mistakes. I didn't respond to her at all, no smile, no raise in eyebrows, no words or anything. After she finished she was breathing heavily and looked at me with a hard stare. Did you know our eyes are the same color? I noticed just how blue hers could look one second, and how grey they could seem the next. The only difference between them were that hers held the deepest gash of pain and suffering that I've ever seen her have, while mine held nothing.

I'm an awful son, Maddie. I let her leave without even bothering to say one fucking word, or even offer for her to step inside for a moment. I just let her go back to her car with tears rolling down her cheeks, and shut the door even before she got out onto the street. She just drove away, but the tear in my heart from abandonment had been too long open for me to feel anything from that.

There's no word of the day today. If anything the word of the day is jackass, and the definition would clearly be me. I'm awful. I'm stupid. I'm whiny. I'm throwing a fit. I'm being childish. I'm being rude. I'm being unreasonable.

But I can't stop.

I wish you were here to snap me out of it. You could smack me over the head, flick my forehead until it was colored with red marks, something to grab my attention and hold onto it with all your might. All I can do is sit back and run through the things you would possibly say to me if you were. It's a broken record player in my head, baby. And it won't stop until I learn to be better.

I hate to mention this, but I have that itch to get my razor. But I can't do that, since I promised never again. But I'm here writing in the bathroom just looking at it. I could reach out and grasp it in my palm until it did its deed. It's calling for me. "You need the pain", it says. Pain is only relevant if it still hurts.

And god, I need it to still hurt. I need to feel something; I haven't in so many weeks, so many months. I've become a shell of a human being.

I can't do it anymore.

love, Louis.

****

Hi hi hi! This was a sad chapter, and I'm sorry about that. :(

Poor Johannah for having her son slip from her :( Poor Louis for letting it happen :(

THIS CHAPTER IS JUST A BUNCH OF SAD FACES OKAY :( :(

But thank you for 100 votes and over 1K reads!! You guys are amazing, you know that? I have the bestest readers. I can't thank you enough. x

Let me know what you thought (even if you hate me for all the :('s I made you have) !