Why She Drowned [1]

the tenth gulp

• x. •

GRIEF WAS SUCH A SOFT WORD TO DESCRIBE its truth; an overwhelming, hideous emotion. Far too much that it made Clair like she carried the world, similar to the myths of Atlas, and she could feel the burden overtake her; dwelled like water into the rivers of her veins and planted thorns into the corners of her heart until all she could inhale was dirt.

If anything, grief tasted disgusting. It lingered inside her mouth and made her cough up blood when she hacked too much, and it never truly washed away (like the blood on her legs and the hurt in her soul because fate took him away).

"Clair, honey."

Clair didn't answer. She felt like throwing up. She tapped the side of her chair. Click, click, click, click. Repeat.

The psychiatrist in front of her, Linda, wore a patient smile, lips like the colour of her nightmares, and tapped the clipboard in her hands to capture Clair's attention. "I know it's going to be hard to talk about what's going on in your pretty little mind, but I need you to talk to me to make some progress. Forget your aunt or your cousin or your uncle. Just focus on me, okay?"

"I want to forget about my dad's death," Clair said thickly, looking at Linda under her eyelashes. "I don't want to talk about him yet. I'm not ready for that." She picked at the wristband. Snap, snap, snap, snap.

Linda eyed the nervous habit and jotted something down on her notepad. "Okay, okay, then we'll talk about something else." She flipped through some of the papers in her hands. "Ah! I see you've started a new school?"

Clair nodded, receptive with the new subject change.

"How has that been working out for you?"

Snorting, Clair shrugs. Too many emotions were swirling, a tangible whirlpool of paranoia and bitter truths bottled up inside of her (and she knew you couldn't trap nature for much longer).

"What about your cousin?" stressed Linda. "It would do better for you to try and get yourself out there, especially with the new slate and all that."

Wrinkling her nose, the young teen slumped further back into her chair. "No one really wants to hang out with me. I'm fine with that. I don't feel like burdening myself with small talk and conversations I'm not interested in. Besides, I think people have realized at this point that I'm not, you know--" Clair twirled her finger around the side of her head.

"You're not crazy, Clair," Linda sighed, "just a little out of it right now."

"You're the only one who thinks so!" said Clair, annoyed.

"Calm down, kid," Linda said, though not unkindly. "What about your depression?" She thumbed the prescribed capsule container, checking the doses were correct. "How's that gotten?"

Everyone keeps asking me what depression feels like, thought Clair, disgruntled. "Everyone experiences it differently, I'm sure. Isn't it a biological component or whatever?"

"How've you been coping?"

The fourteen-year old could feel her eyebrows scrunch in the middle of her forehead. "Depression is like feeling myself sink, but in my grief or anxiety or this pit of nothingness so I can't even hold onto anything to keep me from falling," Clair admitted, "and sometimes I'm okay, I have this standstill where nothing is too bad or nothing is too good, but..."

Yesterday's panic attack had left her relationship strained with her aunt, and with herself (why was she so goddamn weak?). "Sometimes I get the craziest triggers that unfreeze time and as I'm collapse further under the unknown, thinking that everyone is just with me. Perishing slowly, frightened, unsure, but then I look around--I turn around, and everybody around me is--living. Like it's easy to them. Why is it so hard for me?" Her arms flail as her voice cracks. 

Passion was foreign to her. She decided she didn't enjoy it.

Clair takes a breath, but her words are pinched. "They're breathing with their lungs because they still know how to while mine is slowly filling, and I hate it. I just want to climb out but there's no one offering me a hand out."

Linda remained silent, occasionally writing her clients' rambles down for reference. After a few beats with the tired brunette getting her anger to simmer down, Linda asked her the question. "What do you want everyone to do?"

"All I want is to stop being tired of being treated the way I am. I'm exhausted of everyone treating me fragile. I'm not thin ice. I-I know I'm not stable enough that you won't crack the surface if you indent too hard, but I wish people would try to reach out." 

"How can they when you're not reaching your arm out first?" Linda said quietly.

At this, Clair bites her rant short. "All I know is how to be buried under snow. I just want someone to find me here."

She had become sick of fighting a losing storm, because now she cannot find her way home.

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