Happy Endings

32. tired

"Let me sleep. I am tired of my grief.
And I would like you to love me."

☼

A black hole opened up in Kellin Quinn's life and there was nothing he could do to close it or stop it from growing. Every day, no matter how much he tried to ignore it, no matter what he tried doing, he could only feel it becoming bigger, threatening the remaining particles of his decaying peace of mind, and making everything so much more difficult than it needed to be.

He was used to it, somehow, to the darkness that invaded him when he had those so-called bad days, when his mental health faltered, and when he lost the wheel of his life for a day or two. He knew what to do then and he knew what to expect. But this was entirely different and unlike any of those times. This felt off. Scarier.

Nothing was okay again ever since that night and it was bad.

Luckily for Kellin, he was a professional imposter, especially in situations like these. That numbness he now carried in his heart served as the perfect buffer between his inner and outer life, so to the general public everything was perfect. He was ordinary, regular Kellin, and he planned on keeping up the pretense until he figured out how to bury the skeletons of what he'd done.

In all honesty, he didn't expect himself to be this convincing.

At work, things were going great. Amazing even. He started at the new position with enough energy and motivation, and he worked alongside his manager Phoebe a lot more, he already had a shit ton of client work to research, and it was a wonderful and convenient distraction.

But it was all an act, and it was frustrating because after having wished for this for the longest time, it was unfair that he couldn't enjoy it the way he was supposed to. He couldn't soak in that pride, couldn't be happy for himself. That was such a foreign word now. Happy. It had been that way for two weeks.

He couldn't believe most days, that it'd been that long. Could it be considered long? He was counting it more like two weeks in the new job, two weeks of starting over, two weeks of not caring for unimportant, unexisting things. Two weeks of trying his best to forget.

Life moved on, like it always did, nothing ever stopped, especially work. Not even when his heart wanted to leak out every single emotion he felt all through his shirt during his shifts. But he had it under control, like the professional he was. Not thinking of any of his personal business during corporate hours proved to be easier each day. He focused on what was important and that was what mattered in the end.

Nevertheless, he wasn't professional enough to convince himself.

Every night when he got home, after his daughter was tucked in bed, once he was at last all alone, the voices inside his brain became unbearable. More piercing, louder, meaner. That was the moment he tried to find distractions, but they proved to be useless. He ended up tearing himself down either way, going in circles about it, about what happened two weeks ago, five years ago, ten years ago. As if any of that mattered anymore.

That mental box where he kept all his darkest, most obscure secrets and memories never closed again. Kellin couldn't find the lock or the key anymore, and so his mind was poisoned with thoughts of back then, of what-ifs he shouldn't be having, of people he'd rather stay buried. It was bad.

So all alone that was all he could think about, and then he started losing sleep again.

It started like it always did, waking up too early, before any alarms, and not being able to go back to rest again. It became worse once he learned he wouldn't be seeing him at the preschool anymore. Penny had finished her school year already, so he wouldn't have been able to see him anyway, but the symptoms started even before that. His brain wouldn't shut up, the bed was too uncomfortable, and the air too static.