The Situation

TWENTY THREE

ARIABELLA POV

The drive back to school was the longest nine hours of my life, and yet it was all a blur. Harry played his music to fill the comfortable silence floating between us. He pays for a music app unlike I do so having no ads was a nice change of pace.

I'm physically present, i have my mask secured on my smiley face and pretend to be okay, but I'm in my own head.

I'm barely speaking for the last hour, I did one of my dance moves to make Harry laugh and that took all my spoons for the day, all of it drained me leaving me alone with my thoughts.

A dangerous place to be.

I hyper-fixate on the last sentence I spoke today and listen to the gentle music.

"Stay safe."

Is anyone really safe in this world? There is always a chance that you could get hurt by something unexpected or die randomly at any point in time.

We're all on borrowed time, racing against the clock, waiting for our thread to be cut. Nothing in life is guaranteed.

So why is that sentence always the last one they could hear from me? The word stay implies to remain a certain way. Right now Momma is not remaining safe as she was never safe to begin with. She is remaining with the devil himself.

Safe means without harm, that doesn't happen. These two words haunt me. It's almost a slap in the face as this simple phrase is something we can never accomplish.

It fills me with anxiety and dread and leaves me with a sick feeling in my chest.

Harry would look over at me periodically and rest his hand on my knee to let me know he was there for me if I wanted to talk. I couldn't speak, I couldn't form a sentence, or mumble a few words in the air as "stay safe" was the only words being chanted in my brain.

I didn't know what I would feel like or react to being back in that god-awful environment I worked so hard to escape. I never thought about it because I was never planning on coming back.

I'm not crying. I'm not fearful, I'm not sad, I'm not mad. I'm not anything at this moment, I guess it's just a shock to my system. I know after I process everything I will feel all of these emotions or feelings tenfold, but that's another worry for another time, but for right now I'm simply breathing, existing, taking up space and time on this world.

I don't cry when I'm faced with physical pain, I don't cry when I don't get what I want, and I don't cry when I'm sad or mad. I cry in confusion and emotional turmoil, I cry in empathy for others, and I cry from the emotional toll it takes when I get pulled down to the basement.

At this moment I don't cry. At this moment I don't feel. Time and space do not exist in the turmoil of the mind. I have worked so hard to stop being completely numb and void of all emotions, yet here I am back to square one. All my progress I worked so hard snatched away from me the minute we drove into that town.

My chest hurts right where my heart would be if I had one. All I have left are fragments wrapped in a bandaid for a buckshot bullet holes.

I want to be able to be normal when I leave the house and come back whenever I please. I want to have contact with my family any time I want to and not have to worry about being tracked or running into him. I want to smile at all my past memories instead of having a panic attack. I want a normal family. I want to feel what pure joy is and experience what actual happiness feels like. I want the feel what a "boring" day feels like, something plain Jane.

But what the hell is normal? Is it normal to never feel content or remember the last time you were happy?

Is happiness not wanting to die?