Save Me

Chapter Six

♔ Chapter Six ♔

When I came to university, the first thing I did was drink - and I drank a lot. I drank so much that I couldn't walk, I couldn't see straight. I'd stumble into the beds of strangers, the parties of people I barely even knew, and I couldn't remember anything the next day.

It was a lifestyle I'd always had. Getting smashed, fucking some nobody I doubt I'd remember, and waking up the next day ready to do it all again. Rinse and repeat. Then I started doing drugs.

They're so available, at uni. Everyone does it a couple times, and that made me think - it'll be alright. If everyone else was doing them, it'll be fine. First, it was just a couple joints with random stoners at the back of a party, and then it was sniffing lines of coke off the table, swallowing pills, tabs of acid, and after that, it spun out of control. It was always easy for me to spin critically out of control.

Licking the empty baggies of ketamine in the washroom of the club, sniffing piles of ecstasy off of my thigh in back alleys, and spiralling away from the real world. It helped, at first - to lose control, to take in some random fucked up substance and let it fill me up. To let it take me, and own me, and save me.

It helped more than being sober, anyway. And then it didn't help at all.

It hit me all at once, and I couldn't bare it.

I'd left my hometown, I'd left behind everything that I knew, and I ran away. I came to university, I was actually trying. But it can't ever fucking last, can it? That feeling, that fake lie that you keep telling yourself over and over again - you're fine, you're okay, you're great. It never lasts. It always crumbles away, and it always takes you back to where you started.

And that was what it felt like, like I'd been whisked back into my childhood, and I couldn't get out of my own head. I felt like a kid again, terrified of my own shadow, and so fucking alone. In that big house, after they all died, stuck there with him. My fucking dad.

I'd been running for so long. I didn't want to be lonely, I didn't want to feel like that again, I wanted to be free. But I never would be. I'd always be haunted by them, by the people I couldn't save.

Everything seemed so much more simple when I was younger. It seemed like the world was so much easier to navigate, like I'd spent the better half of my life trapped inside a cosy bubble. I couldn't even remember what it used to feel like, anymore, being happy. It seemed too far away for me to reach, like I could feel it at the very edge of my fingertips, and then it would vanish, and I'd remember - I didn't deserve to be happy anyway.

I couldn't remember a time when I felt like everything was right, like I couldn't be held down. Most people look back on their childhood, and they remember being happy. They remember the crazy, toothy smiles. They remember playing in the garden, rolling around in the gorgeous green grass or staring up at the unending blue sky. They remember the street they grew up in, drowning in nostalgia, in the lost freedom of childhood. They remember the freedom they once had, before the world tied them down and fucked them up.

When I remembered back to my childhood, I always tried my hardest to smile. Even now, the first thing I did when I jammed my bedroom door shut was stand in front of a mirror. Every time I remembered my childhood, I'd stand in front of a mirror as I did it, and every time, I'd stare straight at my smiling face, like I was even trying to convince myself.

I was standing and staring gormlessly at my own grinning reflection, and even a smile looked ridiculous on my face, like I was never meant to be happy. It looked wrong, like a big, fucked up lie, and the smile would twist and my head would hurt and suddenly I was crying. Remembering how it used to be, before he died.