taking chances [abandoned]

[ one ] - before

My life changed the moment my mother signed me up for a travelling boarding school.

This wasn't to say that I was in any way ungrateful. It had just come as a surprise - one I deemed neither pleasant nor unpleasant. At the time, I had been seventeen years old and a teenage failure, living on video games, Prozac, and caffeine.

"For god's sake, Elle, get off the computer and do something."

I'd hear that from my mother every day. I'd go cook dinner, or clean my room, or vacuum the attic, and collapse back into my bed like I'd just run a marathon. My motivation was at an all-time low. I couldn't even be bothered to wonder why I couldn't be bothered. "Doing things" gave me something to do but doing them with a purpose? That was out of the question. My purpose in life had committed suicide the day I started thinking about doing the same.

My schedule was this: I woke up late, usually, and even if I didn't there was still no getting out of bed until it was time to eat lunch. I didn't bother with breakfast; I skipped lunch, apart from two or three cups of black coffee.

Dinner was a battleground. I either barricaded myself in my room, refusing to eat a bite, or I'd go down and stuff myself till I couldn't move. My days ended at two o'clock in the morning at the earliest. More often, the clock would tick along until it hit the four or the five before my eyelids felt heavy enough to droop. I had a hard time believing this was my life. In fact, I barely felt alive. 

My father was away often, my mother more concerned with the other children in the family. There were five of them: the triplets, fifteen years old: Audrey, Amelia, and Marilyn. Then there were the twins, twelve years old: Leo and Isaac.

Something I always found ironic about my parents' naming patterns was this: my sisters were named for Audrey Hepburn, Amelia Earhart and Marilyn Monroe. My brothers for Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton.

My name is Elle. That's it. Elle. Named after my mother's sister, who died of cancer at the age of thirty-seven.

I'd like to think it's why I'm this way, but it's my own damn fault. Everything was.

///

I didn't go to school, due to a two-month stay in the psych ward after I cut too deep on purpose and started popping Prozac like the way one would have a packet of gummy bears. I'd missed too much, they said; half of one semester wasn't enough to do my final exams.

"It might give her motivation to talk to her friends outside of school," said one of my therapists. Her name was Dr. Starling, which would be cool if she didn't know my every secret, from my hollow stomach to the ribbons wrapped around my thighs. "School stresses Elle out. I think you should give her a two-month break before summer and when school starts up..."

I had tuned out by then. My capacity to care had reached its limit.

It was only later that I would find out that Dr. Starling had said that school bored me, something I'd told my mother a million times, but I guess hearing it from a woman with a PhD was different than hearing it from your daughter who'd been saying it for a million years.

School bores Elle because school isn't stimulating enough, Dr. Starling had probably written on my file. She's bored and sick of staying in this godforsaken town.

I have to give it to Dr. Starling - it was a pretty good guess. But school bored me because I wasn't living my life; school bored me because my dulled mind couldn't imagine history the way I wanted to, and my slowed brain couldn't piece things together.

I'd spent four months building a blanket cocoon in my room, heated solely by my laptop, and my predictable, monotonous life was shattered with the slamming of a red and black pamphlet onto the kitchen table as I was forcing my pasta down.