mint; （ a. knight ）

8. emerald;

awsten

Catching feelings for someone felt a lot like going insane. I thought about her constantly, found myself gravitating toward things I knew she liked, I heard her voice teasing me for doing something goofy and laughing when I said something funny to impress her. I was a man possessed. I obsessively watched her videos on YouTube and I had to physically force myself not to text her constantly or spend the little free time I had on a FaceTime call with her. Hell, I had even started writing a song about her. It was shitty and worded piss poorly but I'd started writing it and couldn't get the melody out of my head. I couldn't get her out of my head.

I was falling hard and fast like I always did but I wasn't scared this time. I knew she was there, falling just as hard and fast as I was.

And it wasn't like any previous relationship I'd been in. There was no current boyfriends or crazy exes to dodge while trying to get her attention. I was ready to fall headlong into her, into whatever this was between us, because it felt good.

It felt good to be going out of my mind thinking about her because I felt happy. And not the fake happy that I had been chasing the past few months, even before my breakup. This truly felt like happiness. It felt good to actually feel happiness again. I'd been working hard with my therapist to be okay again, to get myself together enough to stand up and keep moving forward. It had been a tough battle and around Christmastime I had actually thought the sadness would swallow me whole. Never in my life had my father's gun looked so appealing.

But I had fought against those feelings, focusing sometimes every single second on the fact that I did not want to die, that I wanted to be alive, that I wanted to be okay, and I had come out on top.

I reminded myself every day how grateful I was to myself that I had not taken my own life. My therapist said it was good practice to remind myself constantly about things I was grateful for. Not because I needed to be more humble — God knows I had no trouble there — but it was important to remind myself of my blessings when the weight of depression and anxiety threatened to crush me flat. It kept my feet on the ground and helped me not get swept so easily in the tide of negative feelings.

It was clear that I was not meant to hear the poem that Ellie read at her friend's event the other day. A bunch of Twitter stans had reposted the video several times and tagged me in it. They were careful to not include Ellie in the blast and she hadn't said anything online or to me about it so she probably didn't know that I saw it. It wasn't like I planned on mentioning it to her, as much as I wanted to. It felt good to have the confirmation that she and I were on the same page.

To be fair, I shouldn't have watched the video. It wasn't meant for me to hear just yet, as Ellie made sure to preface before she read it, so I felt awful for invading her privacy that way. I felt more awful that people had been there, recorded it and sent it to me. But I couldn't control what people did or said online. I could only control how I responded to it. And as much as I wanted to publicly defend Ellie and her privacy, I didn't want her to know I had heard what she said. It was up to her to share it with me. I wasn't going to take that from her.

But I couldn't shake how her words made me feel. My stomach had been full of butterflies created solely by her for a month now. I had been sleepwalking through life for over half a year, between the turbulent last few months of my relationship with Ciara until it finally imploded and then my crushing depression following it, I didn't think I would ever find my way out. Ellie had been a good friend, though, and then one day she looked different to me.

She was mint, my brain had decided quite rapidly. She spoke in green and it wrapped around me like silk chains. Green was my favorite color and it had been tainted by Ciara. I couldn't look at green without thinking about her eyes. But Ellie was green, specifically mint green. She burned through my gray so fast and now it was all I could see. I could live in it, now.