Breathe, Tommy (BxB) (Frat)

Seven・Nothing Personal

It's been a while since I've woken up feeling peaceful after a night's sleep, just to the soothing noise of tweeting birds and rustling leaves. There's an easy breeze and light chatter outside, and a stillness in my chest. I'm calm. For once. Not reverberating off the walls of my head without a way to stop it. I left the window wide open all night, never minding the mosquitoes, and without Aidan cursing me out in his London slang for anything I do that he finds as pesky as I find him. He's been gone all night

On his side of our room, his bed is a transparent representation of how I tend to wake up, which is disorderly and frazzled. But it's like, for a precious moment, I can breathe. The brisk air passes through my throat and fills my lungs, and lying here, looking at the ceiling, I'm okay. For once.

Then, the anxiety decides it wants to continue its rampage when the weight of yesterday becomes the weight of now and I realize I've got to survive another day awake with this purely because I'm alive. It's uncontrollable, even when I was on prescription pills, which I flushed down the toilet a year ago because I needed a fresh start.

It's a spiral — never-ending, and the farther down I wind, the tighter the coil gets, the dimmer the light gets, and the harder to breathe it gets. I start to sweat, then I think about how I'm starting to sweat, and then start to sweat some more; my eyes, my neck, every inch of my body until I ask myself what I'm even sweating over. 

I remember I've sweated over a grim figment of my imagination, that no one is truly out to get me, if they were, they'd have got me already, and the only thing that should be running like usual within me are the cells that keep me living, not the suppressing thoughts that I've made up.

Then I realize that if cells make me up, and I make up the thoughts, then the only way to stop the thoughts is to kill my cells, and inevitably then off myself. Then I think about if we still have consciousness after death and if this will still be my reality. What if I still have consciousness but I don't get to be in control of myself like I am in a human body? Funny, because I'm not in control half the time anyway.

It's a sad cycle. It's a bad one. Nothing I'd ever want to act on, but functioning like this is hard, especially when it's for sixteen hours straight on average.

I'm broken out by a knock on the door. I don't answer it, focusing on bringing myself back to my state of peace. It doesn't knock again, but I soon find myself sticking my head out into the hallway.

Adrift in the air is the scent I've come to know as Christian's, a bit of pine and vanilla, with a hint of frat guy, and the smell of freshly made coffee. On the carpeted dorm hallway floor at my feet, a ribbed disposable cup stands. I take it. I need it. Swallowing my first sip, an unanswered question runs around in my mind:

Why did I think about Christian that night with Giana?

When I finish drinking, I get into a steaming shower but attempting to rinse away the psychological spiral outward-in is pointless. I can't wash away my thoughts. At one point through my lay-in-bed-and-mentally-self-slaughter phase that lasts a solid hour after I get dressed into some sweatpants and a t-shirt, I receive a video call from Mom, Dad, and Olive. It's a temporary fix to my mental issues, but I soon have to face reality again when they leave for Sunday grocery shopping. 

I find myself wandering campus for fresh air when I decide an open window isn't enough, and that not being confined in my room may let some mental healing happen. The debate I had with myself was exhausting. It went something like, "Being outside exposes you to people who want to target you for being gay," but, "Being stuck in my room is solitary confinement, I may as well be a corpse," however, "Society will consume you if you go outside," and, "really, you should be writing your assignments, so shut up." I won.