Oneshots • Gawsten

fucking up & getting over it

this story vividly explains disassociation. i feel like people think disassociation is just spacing out in class. it's not.
shoutout to some of you guys who write & comment funny things that make me laugh even when i'm having days like this. love y'all.

this is major projection. sorry.

mild tw for mentions of blood/scratches and a very brief mention of suicide, i believe. also, existentialism.

———

Sometimes Awsten showed up to class when he didn't feel real.

He knew, realistically, he was. He was made of flesh and bone and there was blood pumping through his system or he would literally be nonexistent, but some days he had to remind himself of that. Some days he felt as if he were the only existing human with a beating heart, and the rest of the world were robotic creatures designed to play some sort of mind games on him. Like he'd suddenly black out and wake up again and there would be a crowd of people staring at him with cold facial expressions from below a stage, whispering about how foolish he was to think anything was actually there. He sat through these days, making sure that once he looked away, nobody's glassy eyes stayed locked on his frame.

Maybe he'd fall asleep one night and wake up and he'd be in heaven. He didn't believe in a god but what if he stood there, staring up at him? Locking eyes with his creator and keeping silence until suddenly the entity spoke and told him that his life was a test. His life was a test that he failed.

Other days he felt like maybe he were the robot, and everyone else was full of flesh and blood. Like he were a science experiment gone wrong, but was placed in society alone.

He'd sit in class with his hood up, occasionally his headphones in if the teacher allowed it, and he'd stare. Stare at his pencil, his desk, anything that wasn't another person. If he looked at them he'd feel a tinge of jealousy course through his system, jealousy that they could feel something and he couldn't. He could feel things sometimes, but when he felt this way, it was like he'd never felt a single emotion with the exception of emptyemptyempty in his life.

Often, he would scratch at the backs of one of his hands, waiting for it to turn a fluorescent color or peel away dead skin, just to be sure there was a reaction. He'd also pick any unnoticable scabs on his arms and hands, digging and digging until blood came out and he could be sure that he wasn't just a ghost, that he had something beneath what everyone referred to as skin.

One day he had no such luck with either choices, his hands wouldn't even change color, and he wanted to scream but anxiety wouldn't let him make a scene so he just rapidly hit himself in the nose "accidentally" on purpose to elicit a bloody nose. He needed to make sure he wasn't in a neverending fucking dream, he needed to know that whatever was supposed to make his heart beat was still inside his body. He needed to taste the iron and know that he was conscious. Know that maybe this would change, maybe one day he could feel the red in his veins rather than looking down at his wrists and seeing blue, defining the fact that nobody was lying to him, not even himself.

It was not cute. It was not pure. He was not a bad boy with a dark back story, he was a normal fucking teenager who was failing three classes because he couldn't find the internal motivation to do any of his work, because the future wasn't an excuse. He tried, and pushed, but all he could see of himself in the future was his twenty-two year old body lying in a coffin buried six feet deep. He was not a kid who grew up in the bad part of town and was abused or heavily disciplined, he was a boy who was raised in a suburban neighborhood surrounded by a loving family that encouraged whoever he wanted to be and whatever choices he decided to make.