Shawn Mendes one shots

Hang On To That Feeling (trigger warning)

"Hey Brian, I don't have much time. What is it?" I asked, struggling holding the phone to my ear using only my left shoulder.

My fingers moved across the keyboard on the computer without my eyes gazing down once as I continued to type.

Multitasking had never been my thing and talking on the phone while typing in corrections for the next meeting at work, wasn't really working out for me.

"It's Shawn" he stuttered and then the air in my lungs what punched out entirely.

Hearing those two simple words made my entire stomach twist and a sickening feeling rose in my already dry throat. My fingers stopped typing and I hurried to grab the phone with my hand. Brian waited for me to speak, but I couldn't force a single word out of my mouth without choking on them. I could barely even breathe.

"He's getting worse"

"How much worse?"

"I don't know what to do"

"I'm on my way."

***

For as long as I'd been with Shawn, he had always been a perfectionist but this past year he had taken it to the extreme. If it wasn't perfect, it wasn't good enough for Shawn. If Shawn wasn't perfect, he felt like he was letting people down and no matter how many times both Karen and I tried convincing him he couldn't be perfect all the time, he refused to believe us and then one day he just lost it.

It was the worst day of my life really; finding Shawn collapsed on the floor at two in the morning, tears streaming down his face and gasping desperately for air, his entire body shaking too much for his muscles to handle.

I'd never seen him like that before; so fragile and so weak. I remember how pale his face was, how brittle his eyes seemed, how much his lips were out of colour and dry. I remember realizing how much weight he had lost; how his clothes barely fitted or how his face had dwindled in to nothing.

I remember standing there looking at this person who was supposed to be my strong, independent boyfriend, but only seeing a reflection of the person he used to be. There was nothing left of the cheerful, dorky kid I fell in love with years ago. The depression had eaten him up from the inside, leaving only a memory of Shawn behind.

At first, Shawn didn't even want to accept the word depression. We weren't allowed to use it around him and if we did, he went off on us. Screaming and shouting; telling us about all the things we didn't know and all the things we didn't understand.

What hurt the most was knowing he wasn't angry in reality, he was hurting deep inside his chest.

Shawn put too much pressure on himself. He had insanely high expectations of how hard he should be working and what he should accomplish and he always felt like he needed to live up them perfectly. It was impossible in everyone else's eyes but Shawn couldn't see that. He could never see it. He kept putting weight on his shoulders, weight too heavy to be carrying alone.

And eventually the pressure building up inside him became too much and he cracked completely. He cracked and shattered into pieces, he didn't know how to put back together.

Suddenly, he couldn't walk out the front door without panicking. Suddenly, getting out of bed in the morning and brushing his teeth seemed to be an impossible task to handle. Suddenly, this sharp pain was nagging in his chest and he didn't know what to do about it or how to make it go away.

He stopped eating, stopped smiling, stopped doing the things he loved. He shut down Andrew and Geoff, he cut of Brian and Matt, he even tried pushing me away too.