Attention || Lashton

Chapter 17

November 11, 2015:

I sat alone at a lunch table, people surrounding me. I felt darkness inside. They were talking and their words seemed to be lost in a silent and nonexistent breeze. "So how are you doing, attention whore?" Someone asks and the words register and I glanced up with my sad hazel eyes. Luke was sat across the table, Michael next to me. 

"I cut last night. Is that what you want to hear?"

Something about me. I didn't need help. Not for the cutting. I am not gaining Luke's attention in a positive way, not yet. There has been other obstacles in the way that has prevented me from getting closer to him. Some people laughed and I just stared at the people with empty eyes. I felt nothing. Not today. The school called my Mum anyway and ever since, I have been placed on a medicine for schizophrenic patients.

Ever since, the voices left. My eyes were always tired. My soul has seemed to left me. The ticking wasn't loud anymore. Humans no longer had faceless faces. I couldn't see the cameras. My Mum won't talk to me much anymore. She thinks I am crazy. Just like my dad. She is disappointed in me.

But I didn't cut the night previous, that was a lie. But Luke looked at me with sad and shocked eyes, but he didn't say anything.

I feel like everything was crumbling. The mindset I was previously in has rendered me incapable of seeing the world from the perspective I did before. Everything seemed so much more quiet. And quiet drives me insane.

--

"Ashton, wait." Luke says.

I stop in my tracks. I don't know why I was still obsessed with Luke. For the two months that he has finally begun paying attention to me, he still treats me like shit. Every once and a while he will tease me and call me an attention whore. Sometimes he never seemed to be there.

But when I turned around, Luke wasn't there.

I held my head in pain, knowing what was happening. I didn't take my medication today... or yesterday... or the day before. But I was still okay. But the medication was flushing out of my system and I felt the side effects. 

You can't get rid of us, Ashton.

I heard a maniacal laugh afterwards. The empty world was filling up again with loud noises that only I could hear. I ran, I ran for a long time. The voices screaming at me, sometimes just quietly making fun of me. I finally came upon a train track, where some people would hang out. But there was nobody here. But I heard a train in the distance. I couldn't see it, but I heard it.

I jumped off the ledge at the abandoned area. I began screaming as loud as I could as I stood on the train tracks. Finally the train came into view. I kept screaming, the voices quiet. Suddenly I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders and they pulled me away from the tracks. I fell on the ground and looked up at Luke. The train whipped by me, and I was unharmed. I began crying.

Don't be a fucking pansy.

This is why he doesn't like you.

This is why, Ashton.

You are a fuck up. You should have stayed on those tracks. Fought to end your life.

"Ashton what the fuck." Luke swore.

And I am not sure what it was, but Luke was fading. "Make it stop." I heard him whisper, without his lips actually moving. I covered my ears and I closed my eyes. I saw a replay of the events, but this time I saw myself climbing the ledge and falling on my ass. I reopened my eyes and Luke was gone. My eyes were wide with bewilderment, wondering what was happening to my mental state. Luke was here. I was sure of it. 

But at the same time, I was sure that I climbed that ledge myself. 

My hallucinations is trickling into real life.

I laid on the cold concrete ground. I stared up at the world above me. There were people out there just like me. They were yelling to silent voices, they were feeling people tugging on their shoulders. My mind warped my perception of reality and I knew that I needed to take my medication. I suddenly got a text from my Mum, saying that I needed to be home in five because of an evaluation. She wanted to know where I was.

So I texted her telling her I was at the train tracks with friends and I forgot about the appointment. I placed my phone down and stayed there, at least until my Mum arrived to drag me away. I began hearing people talking when they were whispering, judging me. I wasn't sure if it was real anymore.

The thing about being on a medication, even for a little over a week, it changes how you see things. It makes you look back on who you used to be and wonder how you were ever this person. How you ever made it through a day. Because subconsciously, I knew it wasn't possible for me to hear those people on the sidewalks from inside the car with closed windows as we drove by at a respectable speed.

I thought about my dad in this moment. How he didn't want to take his medication and would get violent and would break down. I didn't want to be that person. So I looked at my Mum as I silently took out the bottle that I kept on me. I reached for a pill and downed it with water. All without her attention. Maybe she did notice, but she didn't say a word. She was too disappointed in me to really care about what I was doing. It may sound weird to some about a parent acting like that, but as much as she loves my father... She is scared of him, too. Scared of how somebody thinks that there are chips in their brain or how his family is trying to poison him.

And I was on that road. Maybe that is why Luke doesn't want to be with me.