I'm Trying To Sleep

1

"Mama," he said, voice all cracks and sharp, jagged edges. He shook, pressing his hands together underneath the table. The skin of his palms were sweaty and cold despite the warmth of the room. It was stuffy hot. It was uncomfortably hot. It was burning him.

He took a deep breath, air shuttering in his lungs as he spoke. "Mama... I've done something I shouldn't have done," he confessed. There was no reply. "Mama... Mr. Evans found the snip...the snip I've always used. He found it and saw my map, and when he saw my map, he took me to the counselor. And she told me...she told me she'd tell Papa."

He looked down.

And then he looked back up.

"But Papa just said "I'm sorry", and then he opened up the wine bottle and drank himself to sleep. Why did I do that, Mama? Now Papa won't wake up, and I think I should go to sleep too," he told her, and she simply stared. He knew she wouldn't respond. She never did. Not when Zack stepped out the door and never stepped back in. Not when his siblings went away to a greater life, leaving him behind. Not when Papa loaded up his shotgun and sang a sad tune to the beat of gunshots.

"Why did I do that?" He breathed, resting his head against his intertwined fingers. "Why did I do that?"

He stood up, opening up the door that led to his bedroom. Books were thrown around, pages ripped and stained from nights spent singing away the angels and fucking the demons. His ukulele hung up on the wall, and he pulled it down, getting on the tips of his toes. With a soft strum he hummed, pulling out a blade from under the rug. He ran it along his tongue, singing as he bled and bled and bled.

The pills tasted bad, but the aftertaste was great. He threw up on his chair but kept singing anyways, determined to lull his life to sleep.

He closed his eyes.

And so, Tyler Joseph died.

···

It was Josh Dun's twentieth day in a mental hospital. Or was it twenty first? He wasn't sure. When you stared at white walls and dying kids, things stopped making sense after a while. And things stopped making sense long before that twentieth or twenty first day.

He spent most of his days there hiding in his room, carving up his skin with a pencil he had slipped into his sleeve and into his room. The nurses there didn't do body checks, anyways. Instead, they asked you how you felt and if you had any urges. "No" rolled of his tongue easier than his own name, and he began to live his life in a pattern, a self destructive routine.

Josh would wake up at 8 am, sit in the shower until breakfast was done, grab his bobby pins from under his long desk, and step out for a few minutes. His care provider, aka the person who constantly watched him and cared for him, would always lock his bedroom door, telling him he had to go to classes. Sometimes, Josh would comply. He would go to group therapy at nine am, listen to the kids singing their own songs to the beat of their misery, and go to activity therapy at ten. Sometimes they would paint, sometimes they would play a dumb game, and sometimes they would do yoga.

But more often than not, Josh would shove his care provider aside, tell him that he was feeling sick and needed to be let in, throw up dinner from yesterday night, and then lay in bed all day. If they knew he was faking sick, they didn't say anything. Instead the nurses watched him with sad eyes, and his doctors didn't know what to do. If they called his bluff, Josh would just pick his way back in. At one point, Josh even broke the glass of the window on his door and tried to wiggle back in. Blood had coated the floor, and Josh had gotten stuck halfway inside. There'd been a code blue, a syringe stuck in his butt, and he'd woken up in the mental hospital's infirmary.

And on that twenty first day, Josh had been literally dragged out of his room and shoved into the living area where they did some classes and ate. Roughly fifteen kids were seated around five tables with four chairs, all tired and surprised to see Josh's face. They were more surprised to see the bandages covering his entire right and left arm, and a few scratches on his face. No one asked questions when he sat down by himself, chewing on his lip so hard he bled. Yet they all stared, and it bothered him.

"Hey, can you all fuck off?" He finally said, and everyone looked away. His care provider scowled at him, and Josh rolled his eyes, resting his head in his arms. He didn't want to be out here, he didn't want to be in a mental hospital, and he didn't want to be alive. So what fucked up God decided to put him in all the places where he didn't want to be? What fucked up God prevented the rope from working? What fucked up God let his mom walk in on him suspended, grabbing at his throat as he approached his ending?

There was a sudden shifting in a seat across from him, and Josh looked up with weary eyes, prepared to yell at whatever patient decided to piss him off. Yet instead, he clamped his mouth shut when he looked at the face of the kid who had overdosed in the school bathroom at least two times. He wasn't ugly, but he wasn't standardly attractive either. He was the in between, the average kid who no one really had anything to say about.

His skin was pale and there were dark circles around his eyes, probably from lack of sleep or from being alive. He wore a long shirt that carefully covered his arms, and from how he sat with his hands on his lap, Josh knew there was something fresh there. While Josh rarely came out of his room, he knew damn well who was here, why they were here, and how long they'd been there. And this kid...he was new. And that disrupted his routine dramatically.

Josh frowned, watching the kid with silent eyes. The kid was simply staring down at the table, but after a moment he looked up the two held eye contact. Josh felt something flutter in his chest as he looked into those eyes. He looked so broken, so destroyed. What fucked up God would put a blade in his hands and let him destroy his body, his mind?

They didn't say anything to each other for the longest of time. It felt as though the universe held its breath and waited for one to speak, to trigger such a significant change of events that everything associated with them would bend and turn with the universe. Yet neither knew. Josh simply stared, and the boy did as well. Both were as ignorant of the ties that held them and moved them as the next person.

So maybe because of this ignorance nothing happened. Neither spoke, and Josh was the first to look down at his hands under the table, trying to stifle the nervous flutter in his stomach. The boy didn't look away for a few more moments, and his gaze was burning hot on Josh's body.

After his attendance was taken for breakfast and his vitals were taken, Josh hurried to his room faster than ever before, picked the lock with shaking and sweaty fingers, and sprained his fingers and hand from punching the wall as hard as he could.

When his therapist asked him why he had done such a thing, Josh merely stared at him, before looking back down at his bandaged hand. After a moment, Josh shrugged, shaking his head. "I was angry."

"Why were you so angry, Josh?"

Said man looked up at his old therapist with intense eyes, and spoke the words no therapist would ever let go. "Because God is dead, and I'm going to kill him."