Supernova | ✓

chapter one

all rights reserved copyrighted 2016

chapter one

I didn't know what was worse. The silence that ensued when I couldn't fall asleep or the thoughts that haunted me when I tried to close my eyes. In the bruised air around me, with my easel off to the side and my lights strung around my room I became my worst enemy. I knew that I couldn't keep myself contained within those four walls that I often found myself in when the world around me seemed to be bad again. I remembered when I was little and the blankets I lay on would be cocooned around me, wrapping me up and keeping me safe and warm and away from the cruel world around. It was the time that I imagined that Peter Pan would knock on my window and I would turn and see his bright green eyes reflecting youth and true happiness.

I started having insomnia when I was a freshmen in high school. Now I was a junior and wasn't far away from being shoved out into the real world and having to find a job and make money and made to do things that I didn't want to do. I didn't want to go to college, I wanted to go to Art school and although I was passionate when it came to the paintings that I painted and the paint that was splotched across my features and my hands showed my true self I didn't know if I would even be able to make it out in the world.

I didn't know what it was that made me have insomnia. Maybe it was the fact that I was starting to grow up, or maybe it was the fact that the people I thought were my closest friends had drifted apart from me in the summer and I didn't have the support I needed to continue to grow and nurture my dreams like I thought I would.

The only thing that kept me from driving myself insane when the walls around me closed me in and the blackened air reached its fingers down to press against my throat was the stars outside and the field that I had visited since I had a panic attack the summer before I was a sophomore in high school. I didn't know what it was that made the panic attack, but it wasn't until I was in the hospital and my eyes opened and the doctor stood in front of me that I realized what it was that had brought the panic attack out from within the layers of myself.

Stress, that was what the doctor had told me. He said that my parents were talking about me getting a job and the thought of doing something other than my calling frightened me. I had grown too dependent on the part of me that denied any other idea of social interaction other than the little doses of social interaction I had. And so, the panic within me rose and tackled me and I found myself starting to have the panic rise within me more and more and push me down like waves and make it where I couldn't sleep anymore.

And that was why, as I stood in my bedroom with my large glasses nestled on my nose, from another night that I couldn't sleep, I knew that I would have to go to school and act as though everything was going to be okay. I pretty much showed it with my pastel pink hair pulled up in a sloppy ponytail and one of my t-shirts that was coated with paint splotches and a pair of leggings and some hiking boots on.

I knew though that as soon as I would enter my art class my little safe haven away from the field would greet me and I would be alright for a while...because as soon as I painted all the worries of the world around me faded away and I was in paradise.