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The car park is dark and empty, but my falling-apart car sits faithfully where I left her. She’s nothing special to look at, and is probably twice as old and ten times as rusty as most of the other cars that usually fill this car park, but it’s more what she means to me and my sanity that makes her so important—she is my freedom, my get-out clause. She feeds that secret thought at the back of my mind of just being able to start her engine and drive away, never looking back.
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“I hit on you all the time. And I know you don’t have a girlfriend, so you’re either completely oblivious, asexual, or gay. And gay seems more likely than the other two.” “Or you just might not be my type,” I offer. I’m not saying it to offend her. But heck, I’m pretty offended myself, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps because my sexuality is nobody’s business but mine.
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Only stories, plays, poetry slams, anything where words are spoken passionately, incessantly. It brings me great comfort, release almost—catharsis for all the feelings I don’t let myself feel too deeply. All the words I don’t say.
I’m just naturally miserable and bad-tempered, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay here. I’m not completely heartless.” I don’t think, anyway. I frown. Oskar raises an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t say you were bad-tempered, just a bit… antisocial.”
Repeatedly I tell myself I’m not a tactile person, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s perhaps related to my determination not to feel anything too deeply, not to become involved.
Sometimes it feels like life is a train crash, and as I career off the rails, all I can do is lock the door to my carriage and curl up with my head between my knees.
I should snap all these threads that I can feel wrapping around us tighter and tighter, because Angus deserves so much better than what I can offer him. He deserves someone who is not so fucked-up and afraid. He deserves someone who will love him and be there for him until the end of the fucking world. He doesn’t deserve another burden, another broken person in his life. But I can’t snap the threads, and I can’t move away.
However much I tell myself there are no triggers for my depression that I can’t deal with, I know there is one, and this is it. Feeling like this. Wanting a normality I know is out of my reach. Wishing there was a way I could fix the faulty wiring in my brain. Wishing I could promise to never hurt him.
This is why you have to keep your distance, I remind myself bitterly. Don’t feel, don’t ever let anyone reach beneath the surface and your world will stay intact and not crumble around your feet.
“What is the point?” I’m not being entirely serious, but in the past I have had this thought, and it has crushed me. Beyond that, sky is just space. We are nothing but momentary sparks in a darkness so endless it belies any point.
“Have you ever had someone be disappointed in you, and yet you know what disappoints them is just who you are and you can’t do anything about it?”
I know he sees so much more of who I am than everyone else, but I long to tell him that with me, it’s all a front. So much front I’m scared there’s nothing real behind it anymore.
and wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to be in a relationship anyway, giving anyone else that sort of dangerous power over their heart. Of course, then comes the confusing knowledge that it doesn’t matter what you want or however much you try to fight it—if you fall in love, they have that power anyway.
I look up at the ceiling, at the vast emptiness of space described there—the reality of our insignificance is mind-blowing. But a voice that sounds so much like Angus tells me how that only makes it all the more amazing that we are here, that we have found each other as we’re spinning through the darkness.
“Why are you letting him draw a penis chasing a vagina on your cast?” I mutter to Oskar. Oskar shrugs. Soren sits back and starts speaking in the informative, deadpan tone he reserves for saying something scandalous. “I saw it on YouTube. It’s a French advert for condoms. The vagina is not interested until the penis has a condom on.” I roll my eyes. “I am a social warrior in the battle against STDs,” he carries on, smirking. “One blank cast at a time.”
“I hurt everyone who ever cared about me. Then I pushed them all away because I didn’t want to hurt them anymore. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
My first suicide attempt was a few months later. I couldn’t stand all the busyness—being forced to socialise, to smile, to pretend everything was okay. No one was listening to me. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming, and no one could hear me.
They didn’t understand why I would want to end my life. Why I would do that to them—they weren’t bad parents. It was as if they thought I was punishing them for something. I tried to tell them it wasn’t them, but how could I explain? So I stopped talking to them. I shut down even more.
“Since that first attempt, I’ve felt as though I’m balancing on the edge of it. Maybe the ECT worked for me, but, Angus, depression never goes completely. It’s always there in the background. Sometimes I feel as if I’m just waiting for it to call my name. And when it does… I don’t want to hurt you.”
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