The Boy Who Broke Me

Doomed

                                                                               GAVIN

I take a deep breath and feel my lungs expand, let it sit until I can't hold it any longer, then slowly exhale to watch the perfect smoke rings float lazily up toward my ceiling. 

The fan is moving slow, and it methodically cuts through each of them like a knife, turning circles back into smoke again. Soon they'll be too hard to see because it's starting to get dark outside. I haven't looked out the window, but the small amount of light seeping between my blinds is becoming more saturated. Less red. More purple. Night may be approaching, but it's still miserably hot and humid inside my room, like always. It will only get worse too, I tell myself. The lack of air conditioning and this year's summer have been a brutal combination. It's even worse when you live in the projects. All the apartments here have old windows with only thimble of insulation. 

Everything in my room feels damp all the time now, including my skin. Watching my chest rise, I take another drag, holding this one longer than the last. Eventually my body starts to scream for air, so I let it go, watching the rings die with all the others.

Vincent is home tonight, which is rare, but he's in a terrible mood, which is normal. It's easy to tell when he's on one these days. It starts with him blowing up someone's phone and ends with him coming home a few hours later, sometimes with a broken nose or somebody else's teeth in his fist. 

Tonight, he's pacing up and down the hallway, his conversation fading in and out of my earshot in blips. I can tell he's starting to ramp up, and I wish he would go ahead and get it over with. The night is only just beginning but I'm already sick of listening to it. The rise and fall of his voice seeps through the paper-thin walls of our apartment and reverberates around my head, echoing off the emptiness in my room. It's loud, but I'm so tired that I think I can drown it out and maybe even fall asleep under the blanket of sticky heat. I close my eyes, tuning out the rest of the world and pretending that I'm alone in the universe. Just as my heart begins to slow, my phone chimes.

KYA: IDK why ur ignoring me. I don't understand you Gavin. It's not asking too much that you call or txt me back.

I read it through one eye, trying to save off the brightness of the screen before tossing it onto the floor. The text gets under my skin and makes me want to pretend she doesn't exist. Kya's always been super clingy to me, but lately she's been stepping it up a notch. She, like all girls, believes that being in love with me means I'll automatically reciprocate. What she doesn't understand is that I don't do this to her on purpose. I do it because I have no other choice.

I've never liked any girl beyond something physical and I've been with more than my share of them. There must be something in me that's defective, or broken, or something. I know, because I've had girls tell me that they care about me or even that they love me before and even though I knew I should feel the same, I just didn't. Instead of sharing that happy infatuated puppy love thing with them I just felt nothingness, like a heavy black stone sitting inside my chest, waiting to swallow their feelings.

I've tried to like them. I've tried to convince myself that I could be in love with them, or that I could one day feel the same way about them as they do about me. The problem isn't just that I can't feel love, it's that I'm not capable of feel anything. Most of the time, I walk around like an emotional zombie. I feel about half alive and just sort of stagger from place to place, trying to be human again. Experiencing love isn't even the worst of it either. These days, I can't even feel sad or even angry anymore, but it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, I know that I used to have feelings. When I was really little, I'd cry over things all the time. Anytime my sisters were upset, or my mom didn't come home, I could feel sadness build up inside of me until it overflowed. I'd cry, or sometimes not even want to wake up the next day, depending on how bad it was. When I got older, sadness got a little harder to feel but I could at least still get angry. After a while, that went away too until I was just left with a void, like a car missing an engine. Everything about me looks normal from the outside, but nothing works. It doesn't run. I don't move. I'm just stuck.