Excerpt 28 'The Day I died'

The main reason I wrote this isn’t about why you did what you did AC. Because frankly, I do not know why a person would choose to harm someone they love. It’s about the repercussions of what you did. More specifically, the repercussions to me after it ended.

I think everything at this point went rushing through my head. How much I didn’t want to be alive anymore, after everything I’ve been through. After everything he had put me through. All the scars he created. All the scars he had reopened. The way he had left everything undone. The false hope he gave me for a better future.

My chest was tightening. I couldn’t do anything but cry. The worst crying is when you’re lying in bed, with your hand over your mouth so you don’t make a noise. So no one hears you. So you can avoid explaining why everything is falling apart. The tears are running down your face and your heart is hurting because you’re thinking of everything he did to make you cry, and your other hand is on your heart or your stomach because they both hurt.

My life felt like it was ending. That’s how it starts. You notice the little things changing, the days seem longer, the nights seem quieter, you’re having more bad days than usual. At first you just brush it off, you come up with excuses. There’s a full moon out, maybe you’re just hungry or, you’re pms-ing, the list goes on. I can’t get out of bed. Anxiety holds me hostage inside of my house, inside of my head. Where did anxiety come from? Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out of town, depression felt obligated to bring to the party. However, I am the party. Only, I’m at a party I don’t want to be at. Well why don’t you go out and do things. See friends? Sure, I make plans. I make plans but I don’t want to go. I make plans because I know I should want to go. I know at some point I would have wanted to go. It’s just not that much fun having fun when you don’t want to have fun. Then when you’re out with all of your friends you notice that you didn’t laugh as hard as you usually do. And when a cute boy with a bright smile looks at you, your heart doesn’t skip a beat. You know something is changing. You know, but you pretend not to. Because you don’t want to admit that it’s happening to you. Not me, you think, I’m fine. You don’t want to admit that you’re not okay. That you feel like you’re drowning, and every time you come close to the surface you’re just pushed deeper. And so, you get up in the morning, you get dressed, and you do everything you can to make sure everyone thinks you’re okay. You make sure no one knows that you stayed up until 4 am last night, staring at the ceiling. Maybe hoping that he’d call. Getting ghost calls that you can’t seem to answer from his friends who just lie and say they never called to begin with. I can’t sleep. Insomnia has this way of making the moon feel like perfect company. Try counting sheep. But my mind can only count reasons to stay awake. The reasons I don’t want to be alive anymore. So I go for walks late at night. Crossing the road without looking because you don’t really care if you get hit by a car. Hoping that you get lost so that you can't find your way back. Walking home the more dangerous way because you don’t care if you get attacked. You have nothing to lose anyways. You’re by yourself. He left you broken. It’s just another reminder that I am alone surrounded by an ocean of happiness that I cannot baptize myself in. Happiness is a decision. My happy is as hollow as an empty auditorium. I've learned how to turn the anger into lonely, the lonely into busy, so when I tell you I’ve been super busy lately, I mean I’ve been falling asleep watching sportscentre on the couch to avoid confronting the empty side of our bed but my depression always drags me back to bed. You make sure no one knows that you constantly wonder how many pills in the bathroom cabinet you’d have to take for you to black out. And you keep covering every ounce of pain, of numbness, of loneliness with a smile because you couldn’t stand to be a burden to the people around you. Because they don’t understand. Because you’ve grown tired of explaining to everyone why you’re not the same upbeat person you once were. And then when it becomes too much so you sit in a parking lot with the music blasting so loud you can’t hear yourself cry. Or you write some stupid fucking story like this hoping the same person who broke you will finally realize what they did. Go travel like you want to. You never know where the world may take you. I am just a careless tourist here, in my own body. “When a heart breaks, what sound does it make?” Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There is a silence, because when a heart breaks, the person becomes the definition of emptiness. Even when their world crumbles and falls apart in their hands, it is silent. There’s a cruel realization in heartbreak, and it’s that you know you’re about to live where the sun no longer shines – where you can’t even see that your clouds have gone to grey. You don’t have to read in between the lines for this one.