Catharsis || Lashton AU - boyxboy

28. reliz

"And if I could swim,
I'd swim out to you in the ocean,
Swim out to where you were floating
in the dark.
And if I was blessed,
I'd walk on the water you're breathing,
To lend you some air for that heaving,
Sunken chest."
-Say Anything, A Walk Through Hell

l.h.

The sound of silence was truly and thoroughly suffocating.

It wasn't the silent kind of quiet, though; it was the lifeless kind of quiet. Where there's no sound of life, no voices, laughter, not even the light breathing of another person. It was just me, alone, breaths so short and so quiet that if I were only invisible, someone entering this room wouldn't have even known I was there. I was quiet and lifeless, dead on the inside and seemingly so on the out, accompanied by the light rumble of the dryer in the laundry room downstairs.

It was, quite literally, the most mentally excruciating thing I'd ever endured.

I sat on one of the washing machines across the room, hands folded in my lap, breathing small and quiet, nothing but the rumbling and the distant ringing in my ears that was always there filling the silence, and my throat burned from that prominent lump in it, and the room smelled of dryer sheets and soap, and it was all so morbidly sad in a way I didn't quite understand. It was so hot in here, too, despite it being late fall and only in the forties outside, this unbearable heat invading my space, drying out my eyes and my mouth, this disgusting heat that wouldn't leave me alone. I'd been in here so long I swore I could taste the detergent on my tongue, I could feel it everywhere and I wanted to leave but being in here made me feel so clean, finally clean, finally liberated from him, except I wasn't really, and deep down, I knew that, but I wanted it so bad I was manipulating my own brain into believing it. I wasn't free. I'd never be free of him.

I wondered how long I'd been in here, how long I'd spent trying to get rid of him while he was the only thing on my mind, but it seemed like forever. Combined, the washer and dryer only take two hours, so it'd only been just over an hour, but it felt like fucking forever that I'd been here, trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing and failing and failing to forget. Time was so long. Everything took so long. It felt like it'd never end, but it would, and I knew that. Knew that time was ticking away every second of the day, and one day I'd run out. One day there'd be no more time left for me, and I didn't mind. If I couldn't do it myself, I'd let nature take me. Whatever needed to happen so that I'd stop feeling like this all the time. Time was stupid. Forever didn't exist. It was foolish to pretend that it did.

I promised him a forever that I couldn't really give. I promised him a forever that he'd taken and tossed aside, had twisted and broken and bent, because he didn't care. He knew that forever didn't exist, but he let me believe that it did. Bastard. It was all his fault.

Everything had played out this way because of him. That day that we met, he set his sights on me, let me believe that it was destiny that we kept meeting time and time again, but it never was. He knew where I'd be, when I'd be there, he just wanted to play with me but he didn't let me in on the game. He kept popping up, tore my friends and me apart, took away Cassie, the one person who truly meant it when she gave me all of her time. Cassie who loved me, Noel who cared, Sully who didn't but in that comforting sort of way. He took it all away for no good goddamn reason.

But even then, that fucker, even then, I still wanted him, and I hated that I did but I could feel it inside of me, twisting and turning, warping my insides, churning my stomach, nausea setting in. He was there in the pit of my stomach, weighing down my chest, everything I thought of he was somewhere in there, and I hated it, God, I wished it would just go away. I wished that sitting in that laundry room could've washed it all away, could've brought me back to that morning when I met him, when I laid in bed and had to drag myself out of it. I just wished that I had caved, had stayed in bed all day and skipped work and never went to that street corner. I wished that I had let the darkness swallow me whole, so that I wouldn't have to live out the rest of my life with it gnawing at my ankles, infecting me throughout. I just wanted this all to stop but I couldn't even kill myself right.