Caffeine [July Nanowrimo]

seven; bittersweet

Love; intense feeling of deep affection. That was the definition of love. It made me wonder, how someone just decided that this definition could explain love.

Because love was so so much more than "deep affection". It's something that's indescribable and so abstract and unique. It varies according to people and there was no standard definition that can summarize these diversities.

If I had to choose a definition for love though, I would have said that it is to be aware and to accept one's flaws and scars and to never be embarrassed of them. I would have said that love is when you accept one another regardless of whom they are. Love is unfair, because someone who's an angel could fall in love with a demon.

I had always thought that I was in love with Derrick. I accepted the fact that he was outcast and I was not embarrassed by it. I would have said that he was my angel and I was the demon.

But as those words tumbled from his mouth, I can't help but think that perhaps the flaw in him was not that he is an outcast. It was how he could hurt someone with just a few mere words.

For a moment, guilt raced through as I realized what a hypocrite I've become. I had thought of being an outcast as a flaw, just like everyone. I was glad that my perspectives to these sorts of things were no longer skewed like it used to be.

I then thought about his words once again.

"Jake would have been so proud of you"

Jake.

When will that four letters stop haunting me?

I felt my race faster -not in a good way- and my breaths rapidly became shallower, turning into gasps. My senses were shutting down one by one, like those draping stage curtains after the finale.

It was like I was swallowed in a black hole, where you lose consciousness and who you are. Except that it wasn't a black hole, but the anguish screams of your emotions and the rush of flashbacks that transported you from memory to memory.

I vaguely heard my name being called out, but it was like I was in a state of dreaming, except that it was a nightmare in a dream. Poisonous thoughts leeched out of every corner of my mind, spurting slimy dark thoughts that was too overbearing for my consciousness.

People say that it’s hard to lose people you care of. Which is true, but the word ‘hard’ didn’t feel like a strong enough to describe what I went through. Hard didn’t match up to the swirling emotions that I constantly dealt with every day before I go to bed. Hard didn’t match up to the way I clawed for control in my body. Hard didn’t match up to feeling of helpless and being a shell to a soul that was no longer yours. Hard could never match up to how I felt bound and helpless in this shell that encased me, unable to stop me from my self-destruction.

As this vortex of emotion sucks you in deeper and deeper into it, you will finally reach its core. By then, you would have lost all hope and energy to fight for rationality and that is the moment where you wish that you could close your eyes and never open them again. It was not a wish of death, more like a comatose, except that all you can feel is the things around you but not yourself. After a while, you get sick of the emotional whirlwind and the speeding memories and you get exhausted of the feel of the rawness in your throat, a side effect of screaming involuntarily. You start to get angered of those tears that create sticky tracks on your cheeks and taint your lips with its salty taste. Your head starts to hurt since your whole body shuts down and go on an overdrive.

I felt myself slowly going numb, but it was like throbbing everywhere on my body. The numbness screamed to be noticed and it was so loud that it hurts. Suddenly, one by one, my senses started to come back, returning to me. My mind somehow adjusted back to this and I tried to gain my bearings.