L'Appel du Vide (Nocebo Effect P3)

I mindfuck because I can't be trusted

It's been so long since the beloved Dallon Weekes, my irreplaceable masterpiece, committed suicide without so much as a fucking warning — at least a month, maybe more. I wrote to him every single one of those days, yet I've lost track of the sum. You'd think a boyfriend would remember when the most important person in his life no longer possessed a life, but the math is too tiring for me when all of this shit is assaulting me from every side, and I've never been very skilled at plotting dates, but I at least know that it's been a prolonged while that I've barely endured without crumbling myself.

And at least three fourths of that time was me spending so long trying to convince myself that Dallon would be back, that Dallon would be right around the corner in the living room with a paintbrush in his hand as always, but every single time I would turn around and he wouldn't be here, and so many sobs would cling to my throat, and my house would no longer smell of peppermint, and I would be alone.

I should be able to survive this, as this was my situation in middle school, because Kara didn't really amount to anything in her level of tenderness towards my dilemmas with her acute disillusioned outlook towards life (I think she called it her emo phase, but now she looks back and cringes on it profusely when it unwelcomingly pops into her brain like a pimple on an adolescent's face), so I was forced to figure out how to solve my own problems with little to no help, including little to no help from Ryan Ross, who was supposed to be my emotional lifeline as my friend but isn't here even now when I need it most, because this is permanent. This isn't like being bullied, where you know the bullies will receive their dose of karma while you watch them smolder in the hellfire they sparked and never pity them because it's the result of the actions they willingly executed, but Dallon isn't a bully. He's the opposite, actually — he was bullied, by Spencer Smith and his idiots of a posse, and he didn't deserve the malevolent karma of depression and suicide as an effect.

In my pondering, I surmise that karma materializes in different archetypes for everyone. For example, the latently terrified are struck with immediate danger, whereas the hopeless are met with everlasting mental illness to steal any last bits of faith they may have stored inside their barred heart. Spencer is of the former, and Dallon and I are of the latter. We're all weak, but the difference between us and them is that we've known since the beginning that we're screwed.

However, I've always been so impressionable to the point where even if I know there's no chance for me, I'm still bombarded as much as the foolish. In this relationship between Dallon and me, I was the fragile one, and he were the person who tucked me into a package with care so that I wouldn't be harmed, and while others may think that this is a beautiful metaphor of how much we loved each other, in truth it is actually acknowledging that a packer's job is to send things away.

That must've been my karma, as if I hadn't experienced enough of that drive already, because if I am of the latter group, that means I am dealt lifelong mental afflictions into my playing hand, but it's like a dead card, because there's no possible way I could use it to my advantage. It's a faulty card for my circumstances, and it's forever clasped in between my thumbs, but I'm an integrous enough person that I wouldn't play the card and pass it on to others. That's the disparity between Spencer and me — he's willing to shove mental illness onto others in the form of bullying just to rid himself of it, but I will tote it in my handy bag of brain terror and suffer in the silence I chose to keep.

Am I a good person? Should I win freedom from this mental illness? Should I have been chained to it in the first place? I just don't know these things about myself, and Dallon isn't here to assure me of the answer, though he's probably sugarcoat it anyway. Or maybe he'd be honest, because he's lied enough to me already and doesn't need another fiber on this web of lies we've fabricated throughout the weeks we've known each other.

In fact, that web of lies has been expanding even after Dallon's reckless suicide that left me clueless as to how I'd carry on, but I did, but it was only through misconceptions and false hope. I said he would be back, but no one returns from suicide unless they never really killed themselves at all, and Dallon is not the type to stage a fake death, especially because he was so fucking wearied by simply existing. He could be alive, though. This might be a psychological experiment, but so was the placebo effect that ushered him to his suicide. I'm furnished with fallacy, and I'm somehow okay with that, too, because I feel like I need a bit of dreaming in a life that's usually so pragmatic, and when I try to sleep, try to rest my head on a pillow that's too rock solid for my taste, I never can drift into fantasy, but when I do, it's just black and dark and dreamless, and I've never maintained faith in that or in my world.

I wish I could dream, wish I could assemble worlds from scratch just with the power of my mind, wish I could refresh myself while I enjoy a play I myself have created, but I can't do any of those for whatever illogical reason, and I presume that transfers over to my gloomy and self-deprecating reality. Maybe I've attempted dreaming before but despised it. Maybe I've just forgotten.

I've forgotten a lot of things lately. Kara has told me numerous times to buy milk at the grocery store, though I hate milk, so that's probably why it escaped me. I am now unable to locate things that would come so easily to me before, and I spend a half an hour at a time merely searching for the missing item, usually never finding them at all because I give up like always I don't know which days things occur, like when the trash man visits or when my school serves ice cream after hours I've forgotten so much, and I'm somewhat fine with that notion, because the way I see it, I'm simply making space in my brain for other, more important facts that I still probably won't ever need in my career, but with some luck nothing about Dallon has swiped itself from my gripping mind, and I don't know if that's how I really want it, because on one hand he fucked me up so badly to the verge of tears every second I waste thinking about him and his hair and his scarves that I may or may not have a kink for pulling towards me to kiss him, but on the other hand he's the love of my life and remains to be, and to forget him would be forgetting a part of my own soul. I'm too hollow from middle school to carve myself out again, so I fervidly require every scrap Dallon Weekes, every scrap that isn't here, every scrap that is dead and lifeless and shoved into a cage by "placebo" pills, every scrap that I cannot have, despite my earnest hunger for it.

I guess that's fair, though, because we as humans can't have everything we wish for, but I at least thought that I could have Dallon, life and all. I could've helped him through his depression. After all, I did it for myself, so what's to say that I can't do it for him? I could've been the best boyfriend in the history of the world if he would've allowed me knowledge of what was plaguing him, because I realize that I can't fix depression entirely, but I could've imposed coping methods and cuddling and everything that Dallon would need, and I'd benefit from it, too. It would be perfect, like a symbiotic cycle of water from tears and giggles from lungs practically bursting with elation, and everything would be okay.

On the contrary, everything is not okay, because my friend is dead, and I'm wilting on the dismal inside, and nothing in life feels correct anymore, like it's tilted to the side and is flopping back and forth like a seesaw bringing me sickness but not a paper bag, and I'm finding that the fresh aroma of vomit on my clothes isn't nearly as pungent as the lack of peppermint aroma in my house that was such a comfort to me when Dallon was here, but now when I occasionally sense it on random items like my blankets and the bathroom and my t-shirts, it's a mess I have to clean up, grievance a pest for an already soggy mop in the hands of someone who really doesn't want to be here but is forced to, and I can only assume that I'll be forced into doing a lot more things down the road, and Dallon can't protect me from them.

~~~~~

A/N: idk what this was lmao

aesthetic: squads of boys in boarding schools *cough* the dead poets society

~Deadkotaetsociety