The Metamorphosis Diaries

Chapter 27 - Sugar is Nice and Pumpkin Spice. And also, Mackie.

Chapter 27

I had a dream last night. I had a dream that I walked into school and I knew everyone knew what I had done. And nobody said anything. Ever. I sat in my first period and worked, and worked... In such a daze, that within my dream I woke up. The whiteboard became a mirror and I was looking at myself with the words "whore" written all over my body in permanent ink, with the pen leaking in my own hand.

I knew it was bad now. Most of my dreams were mindless and had little to no relevance on my life. I would dream of things that bothered me a month ago, or of things on my mind that I had weeks to come to worry about. Sometimes the day before a test I will dream I failed the test and my parents disown me and then I go shopping and try to check out but have no money. But this was so much darker.

When I woke up for real, I wanted to scrub the skin off of my body. Everything felt like it was crawling, shaking, shivering. I felt like hands were under my skin, grabbing at my muscles, and the only way to stop them was to rip my skin off and break the fingers.

I was having a panic attack.

Once again I sat in that music storage room, somewhere between shelves, breathing with my knees to my chest. The same BANKS song played as I rocked myself back and forth. Won't you be my problem? It's okay with me if it hurts...

My uniform tightened uncomfortably around me every time I inhaled. I felt anxious being in a skirt and not sitting lady like; I was completely paranoid from my mom's words constantly nagging me as a child. I remembered how I would ask to go to the bathroom three times in a single period because of how she'd always mention how loud I blew my nose. Since I was in a constant state of having a cold, it was a daily task to sneeze over and over again. I remember how eventually the teacher would get suspicious and say no, and I'd sit in my desk sniffling short breaths to stop my nose from running without being too loud. I shivered with guilt at those memories. I cried harder as my own mother's voice played in my head. It no longer brought be comfort, and it never really did.

This was how my panic attacks usually went. I would start on one thought and my mind would travel to a million others. I had practiced my breathing squares so much during panic attacks that it was now just called breathing. I didn't know how to distract myself anymore. So I played music. I sang.

Heart break is your game but I'm learning... My voice cracked terribly between lyrics. I needed to stop listening to songs that relates to my panic attacks while I had them.

—

"Mackie. Mackie. Mackie. I-I need you to come over. Like right now. Please come," I shook.

"I'll get Zander to drive me over. What's up?" she said, with a worried tone. I felt bad for worrying her.

"I need to tell you in person. You're not gonna like it."

She hung up and within forty minutes was next to me in bed.

"Are you going to tell me yet or what."

"I—"

"And I swear if you called me over here just to tell me you want chinese again I will—"

"I slept with Darren."

"No! Pumpkin, no! When? How?" she sat up and shook my frantically.

"It was over the weekend, at some party. I went with Argus and left in a cab."

"You ditched Argus to fuck Darren? I thought you liked Argus? Why wouldn't you have fucked Argus?"

"He ditched me!"

"Okay, fuck Argus right now, that's not my concern."

"What a metaphor, eh?" I scoffed.

"What do you mean?" Mackie furrowed her eyebrows.

"Is Darren even real? He's like the chip on my shoulder. The thing I've been trying to shake off for years. The chip doesn't know it's a chip. He's a chip, he just, I don't know, just chip things. But me, I know. Always weighing me down by the slightest, always in the corner of my eye. Chips are my guilty pleasure. I shame eat them. Have a bag under my bed. Wait, what kind of chip is on the shoulder? Like an edible chip or a wood chip?"

"Girl, what the fuck are you—"

"Anyways. Back to my point about metaphors. He's this itch I can't scratch cause the limb is gone. He represents everything about myself that I hate but can't change. He's the sum of everything bad that's ever happened to me. Maybe I thought I had lost. Maybe I thought I had deformed until we were the same shape or something poetic like that. Sometimes I still think that. Like I have nothing else to give for myself so everything just becomes him. My songs, my poetry, my pain, my body. Nothing belongs to me!" I sobbed. "Nothing is left for me to love. I am the sum of—" I began to choke. "I am the sum of every bad thing that has ever happened to me. I belong to my darkness... I-I belong to him..."

Mackie held me as I cried hysterically in her lap.

"Pumpkin, you're so much more," she said. "So much."