Endless solo of solitude | Lookism various x reader

Compendium of Misery.

To live is to feel emotions (you're quite poetic, aren't you?). Funnily enough, right here, right now, you can't help but wish the concept of emotions came with some sort of an off-switch. Human life would be way easier if you all were born with programmed levers or buttons you could pull down on or press on to control these stupid, pathetic emotions. But you suppose in the wise words of your homeroom teacher: to live is to feel. So you guess are alive, even while it's nothing less than painful. The thoughts overwhelm your small mind.

As you shut your eyes, you're suffocating in air. You can hear your breathing and feel your chest burn, but are you really still alive? Your lips purse, your hands fisting the empty, cool layers of cotton fabric beneath you. What's the point of everything? you wonder with a sigh. Is this it?

Yet another sleepless night passes by like it's nothing. You've been trying and trying but your efforts all go to waste. You can't sleep, and you can't seem to find a peace of mind. You rethink every moment that's led up to the inevitable; if you had stayed back with Sally, hadn't left her with Eli alone and instead joined them, you wouldn't have been with Jake, and you wouldn't have encountered Samuel. So the confrontation with the Black Bear gang wouldn't have happened either. But would it really have made a difference?

This question gnaws at you. Even if you had taken the other path — would the outcome have diverged, or would it have simply reshaped itself in a different skin, following you the way a shadow does to a to light? Was it fate? Coincidence? Or just a chain reaction of decisions, all of which were yours, and therefore yours to carry?

You let go of the bed-spread, hands clutching at your head. Tight. Unyielding. Lately, it's all been but a stupid thrum of events. You don't have another breakdown or whatever you call it (the puke, the tears, it drains the colour from your face. You don't want to imagine it again. No. No. Never); mostly because you no longer interact with other people, dumb as it sounds. Your bed has become your new source of comfort. Faces of friends... are blurred, or it could be your mind playing tricks on you. No gym. No school. No family night. It's cool. It's fine. You don't mind.

It's nice to lay around staring into nothingness, losing sight of what matters, what doesn't, or playing fickle video games, staying up past your bedtime to eat trashy food and binge scary films. To relieve is to overcome, but you're scared. Of it all. Of it happening again. That day, as you've dubbed it, is never brought up in front of your parents (should we take her to a doctor? you hear your parents ask one another in the late of night. You don't need it. You know you're not okay. You don't need someone to diagnose you for it, least of all charge expenses your family doesn't have the means for). You're afraid of asking why they're so worried about you when they should worry about themselves first and foremost. You're selfish. Can't everyone be selfish too? It would make you less bitter, more sorrowful.

The trauma doesn't arrive loudly. It creeps in. It sits at the end of your bed, watching. Sometimes, it speaks in silence. A silence you've grown to despise, itching at every pore of your skin, knives between your teeth forcing you down. The vivid image of that man; breathless, half-conscious, unrecognisably human, presses into your mind like an unwanted brand. You remember the sickening smell, the heat of panic in your throat, the knowledge that if someone hadn't stepped in... it could've been you. That version of you still lingers, not dead, but buried under a future you narrowly avoided.

Your mother makes the idea of checking in on you a nightly routine. Stop. You want to scream, you're thankful, beyond grateful, and you know how privileged you are to have people who care so much, but you just want to be alone. The pounding gets worse, gets louder. Eyes burning with the tingling sensation of iron, lips bleeding. Each time you think you've gotten better and made progress, the fires you've managed to kindle go out faster. A small flame. No chance at surviving. What's the point of trying? Of trying to move forward? When all you're doing is forcing yourself to stay behind.