Illusion | Harry Styles AU

Punctured Hearts

This story contains psychotic depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts; drug and alcohol use as a coping mechanism; detailed hallucinations including violence; and multiple main character deaths. This is not a happy story and it will not have a happy ending. If that's not what you're looking for, turn back now.

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I witness the ones that are left behind, crumbled among the jigsaw puzzles of realization, despair, and surprise. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs. -Markus Zusak

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I was dead. Sometimes I feel like ending it all, just for revenge. Then maybe the girls at school would feel the pain I feel. My parents would feel a twinge of sympathy towards me, a weary realization that maybe they had something to do with it. Sometimes I want to be dead. Not only would I be done will this bullshit, but I'd also get to make everyone around me feel awful for it. I am a sick and twisted person. You might even say I'm insane. I probably wouldn't be listening, anyways.

I think it started when I was thirteen- the depression. I lost my closest friend in a car accident. For weeks, I felt numb. I couldn't speak, or cry, or do anything but listen to music and think about how sad I was. I don't think my parents- or anyone, for that matter- realized how awful I felt. I never really did get better. I dealt with issue after issues until I crumbled away for good.

I turned to pills. They helped me survive. I took all sorts of pills- painkillers every morning to numb the pain, Ecstasy tablets at night when I got drunk with strangers and felt free. I was a trainwreck at just fifteen, but nobody realized. I was quiet, but intelligent at school. I didn't have any friends, and I left the second I could- but that wasn't unnatural, was it? Nobody knew about the pills that I took just to get through the day.They didn't understand the reason I'd chosen to make my first two classes free periods was so that I could get drunk at night and wouldn't have to show up to school until 10:00.

Nobody knew, until a girl spat on my face at lunch during sophomore year and I had a panic attack in the bathroom stall afterwards. Nobody knew, until my poor English teacher walked in on me attempting to kill myself with the same pills that made me feel safe in a world of chaos. It was a big mess, and it caused a lot of trouble. My uncle told me I could go ahead and kill myself, but I shouldn't let other people know about it- that was our personal business. I'd excused myself to take another handful of pills.

So after that fiasco, I went to therapy and got homeschooled. For a second, I even thought I might get better soon. Instead, I just went mad. I began to hear voices. They were little whispers at first. I thought my mother was calling for me, but later found out she'd been running errands. Once when I walked over a bridge with another homeschool girl as part of a field trip, I heard people yelling for me to jump. The strange this was that this girl and I were the only people in the park. There certainly were no screaming people.

My parents began monitoring my home life more and more, making sure the people I hung out with looked respectable and all that shit. My curfew was 11:00 at night, and they tried their best to make sure I didn't stumble home drunk. As the weeks turned into months and I turned seventeen, I just got really good at making the people I partied with look normal. I also made my conversations with my parents brief during the day so that our goodnight conversations weren't long enough for them to smell the alcohol or realize I was drunk.

My entire life was an illusion, and the game got worse and worse as time went on. I started thinking of creative ways to kill myself, any place at any time. I never did have the courage to do it. But sometimes, when something awful happened, I felt the pain rush over me and my tears stream down endlessly. I couldn't breathe or think, my only thought being- I need to be dead. Those were the night when it settled in- I was depressed. And I was not getting better.