Through The Dark

18 - Olivia

18 - Olivia

I was at my locker the next morning before classes started. My legs were moving in every direction a lot –almost as if they had their own life- and I kept scratching the top of my head. There is a newfound itch there that did not want to go away. And I took enough care of my scalp as to know I had no dandruff.

This reminded me of a story I read once for English class last year. I could not recall the name of the story but I did remember the storyline (maybe all too well because I was living a modern version of it). The woman travelled in an airplane with her husband, who could not keep his hands to himself when it came to other women. He could barely keep his eyes on her though.

As the story went on, they got on a car and drive on and on. She had a feeling of Deja vu, like she had seen this all before. All of a sudden her scalp started itching. She scratched and scratched, not being able to stop because the itch was just too much for her. She felt something falling on her. It was small dark flakes. When she touched them, though, they unmade on her hands. It was not long enough before she freaked out and when she turned to her husband he was melting, literally. Before she knew it, she was back on the air plane. The story played again exactly the same way two times more before she realized that the air plane had crashed and that she was stuck in hell with her husband, her punishment being reliving the incident with him by her side for the rest of eternity.

I stocked up my backpack with the books I would need today patiently –more like slowly- as I tried to force my mind to stop thinking about the story, but most importantly about what had happened yesterday. I confessed to Emmalyn I had tried to kill myself. Sure, she had been there to see the whole thing and she was the one that had saved me. But it was not until yesterday that I had talked about it out loud. I talked about it as if it was weather news. Well, more like tornado news, but still.

It made everything so real and scary. It meant it was true: I got to a breaking point where I tried to kill myself and now that my head was finally around it, I felt like a failure. I felt undeserving and ungrateful. It just made me want to beat myself up even more and harder. I was a terrible person. My life was good. I had everything I could ask for, materially at least, yet I still felt empty and like I was missing something all the time. I knew what I had and what I did not, but with what I had it should be enough. I should be able to move on, get my head around the idea that Anna was not going to come back. She was gone and I should go on with my life and be happy. But for some reason or other, I could not.

It terrified me to think that now the material stuff was all I had left in my life. The big group of people that I hung out with and that I thought I could still hang out with had been nowhere to be seen. That was not common. At first time in the morning we would always meet up at the hallways to hang out at the bleachers or whatnot.

I zipped up my backpack and slammed my locker's door shut as I took a good look around, making sure they (anyone actually, I was not picky at the moment) were not waiting for me at some corner or something. There were packs of people, talking, laughing, but none of them were waiting for me. When they saw me staring at them they leant in and started to whisper. I felt singled out right away. I was not used to being the talk of the town -at least not in a bad way. And I had no idea of how to handle it.

I hunched my backpack further up my shoulder and then I kicked off to the bleachers. Maybe I arrived late and missed them. I just wanted to escape the whispers and the hallway that all of a sudden looked much smaller than it did when I arrived.

I had no idea why the sudden urge to be with them had come. Just a few days ago, I was sick and tired of everything and everyone. I was sick of their fakeness and of pretending like I cared about what they told me. I had not considered them important until now. I guessed I had been feeling quite lonely and that now that I was living and moving on from the mess of last week I had the need of going back to routine, to what was once normal -even if it never really was. I just needed to go back to something. Hopefully that way I would not feel like drowning.