Lights Up - Prinxiety [COMPLETED]

Chapter One

Trigger Warning: Slightly graphic mentions of past suicide

There's something therapeutic about watching the world fly by from the window of a plane, but there's also something very frightening about seeing the place you know to be so big looking so small.

It's an interesting thing to think about, but giving it too much thought can make one feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. A house seems massive compared to the size of human being, but a skyscraper seems even bigger. When you think about your city's place in your state, it's almost impossible to truly understand what a small part of the world it takes up. The same can be said for the state itself, or even the country, or the continent, or the very planet itself. Out there in space, there's millions of astral bodies that are larger that Earth in a way that makes one want to disappear from the feeling of being insignificant in the universe.

I've never enjoyed flying; every thump of turbulence, every quiver of the walls, every vibration of the seats causes my heart to lurch up into my throat, making it very difficult to swallow comfortably. If I'd had a more fortunate childhood, I'd have gotten used to flying to some extent from vacation flights and such, but the only time I'd ever been on a plane before this was for two funerals.

This was a much different circumstance than a funeral. I could see the city skyline of New York approaching from my viewpoint in my plane seat. That was my new home; I didn't exactly want it to be, but there was too much weighing me down in Gainesville. I couldn't stay there anymore. My father passed away in a car accident while on a business trip when I was seven, and thus caused my mother to fall into alcoholism. It brought out a whole other side of her, it made her truly speak her mind. I had to live with the fact that the woman that had brought me into the world, now wished she could take me out of it. She reminded me of that fact nearly every day of my life, and I honestly can't blame her for feeling disappointment whenever she looked at me.

I wished I could just disappear for five years of my life. I was thirteen when I realized I was gay, and I was thirteen when I experienced my very first beating for being homosexual. More would follow in my remaining five years of childhood. They stopped after I graduated, purely because I never saw the kids behind them anymore, but the ridiculing continued whenever I left the house for the last three years I'd spent in my home town of Gainesville, Florida. Three years I spent giving fifty percent of my income to my mother and trying my best to help her.

The day before my twenty-first birthday, she went out for a drink and never came home. I found her body in the alley next to her favorite bar, a smashed bottle on the ground beside her, and a shard of glass still in her hand after using it to slice open her wrists.

I didn't cry.

A week later, here I am, sat on a plane bound for New York City and designated to land in just under an hour. The concrete jungle is meant to be a city founded on the belief that opportunities were around every corner, and that business could still thrive alongside dreams. I had to leave the baggage of Gainesville behind, I had to escape before I ended up with the same fate as my late mother. New York City was too busy all the time to care about one person with some trauma and an instinctual urge of self preservation. I could try to start over here, and if I struggled as I did so, no one would notice.

I mainly chose NYC because of one of its most famous streets: Broadway. I was on the crew for every single show for all four of my years of high school. Despite my anxiety for the stage, I felt a strange pull toward it. Musicals and plays, they made me forget just how insignificant I am in this world, because even if only for a little while, I'm apart of something bigger than just myself.

However, it was wishful thinking to assume that I'd obtain some sort of position working on a Broadway show within the first month of living in NYC. I'm not an optimist, I know better than to hope for things that won't happen.