Catharsis || Lashton AU - boyxboy

32. løslate

"Write a song, make a note,
For the lump that sits inside your throat.
Change the locks, change the scene,
Change it all but can't change what we've been."
-Atlas Genius, Trojans

l.h.

'Don't throw stones in glass houses,' they say. It seems that simple, a lesson your mother teaches you before your frontal lobe has developed. There is nothing to gain from destruction. I know this.

But do the same rules apply when it's glass eyes and mine are stone?

Glass eyes that were more of a home to me than I'd ever known.

I'd always felt like a stranger in my own house, like I never had enough time to settle before tragedy struck again. It makes you feel like you're frozen still. You know when you're in a stranger's house and it's too cold to get comfortable? That's how it always felt in my home. Constantly on edge.

He knew it was coming before I had said anything. The reason I say it must've been the look in my eyes is because I can't imagine, in my state of lifelessness, that I had given any other indication of my intentions. I was stone cold: rigid, sharp, unforgiving. I had created a switch in my head for instances like this: sensitive one minute, dead inside the next. Something I had learned how to do in spite of my own empathetic morals.

Maybe they weren't even mine.

Are any of our morals really ours, though?

I guess that begs the question of: are babies inherently good? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to imagine that, say, Ted Bundy, was an inherently good child. That he hadn't become a sociopathic murderer until after he figured out his "sister" was his mother, that he wasn't just born with his grandfather's depraved hatred of women.

But, in any case, what do I know about neurology?

I had to get away from him. He had fallen asleep on me and at first it was comforting, warm, like I might pull through this time with him by my side. But then I started thinking about Sully again, and his art, and his mom (who I needed to call) and then I started to think of my mom, and then Dad, and then Jack and then Ben and then all of the sudden his weight on my chest was suffocating and I couldn't breathe. So I shoved him away from me with no concern for waking him. I hadn't seen him in over a week. He looked terrible. Worse than me, maybe. I didn't know what I looked like but I could imagine it embodied how I felt.

He looked at me bewildered, arms braced in front of himself as if in an act of defense. I had no idea what he'd been through these past couples days, home with his dad who he almost killed, if that had any affect on their relationship. Maybe his dad left him alone now. Maybe they fought more. I wondered if Lauren and Harry were still there, or if they had been with their grandmother. Sometimes I thought about calling DCF, but then I knew it wasn't my decision to make, that it might complicate things even further.

I can't believe I kicked him out of my house with nowhere else to go but home.

He could see it, though. That I had made a decision. And by the way he looked at me, glass eyes and all, the sharp, shuddery breath he took inward, he must have known it was not a good one.

I took a step into the murky water.

"I can't do this anymore, Ash," I told him, but it barely sounded like my own voice: uncharacteristically hollow, too quiet for even my own ears. He clenched his jaw, still donning his defensive position. I wish I were better at reading people, to have some idea of what he was thinking.

He opened his mouth and then closed it. His eyes watered and he swallowed loud enough that I could hear it. I could feel a ghost of that lump in your throat you get when you're trying not to cry, but I knew it wasn't really there. I didn't feel like I could cry anymore. It was a very morbid feeling but that just wasn't enough.